[MUSIC PLAYING]
This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to this special edition of entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
We're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
The year is 2011.
And it's the month of April, which invariably calls to mind
those famous opening verses of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland
April is the cruelest month reading lightlacks out
of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring ray.
And those words ring as true today
as when they were first composed.
And sooner or later, I think we're
going to have to come up with a less ironic name
than greenhouse effect for the choking of the atmosphere
with carbon dioxide.
Green is the wrong color.
The color is ashen.
One tenth of the carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere
comes from the fires of deforestation in Brazil alone.
That's a lot of green going up in smoke.
The earth is on fire.
It has a fever.
Maybe we should call it the fever effect,
rather than the greenhouse effect.
But beyond its name, this effect is part of a worldwide
phenomenon that will mark the ecological legacy of our era
desertification.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Oh, I wish I could tell you that that was me playing.
It's actually Joe Sartriani.
Now, those of you who are longtime listeners
of entitled opinions have heard me quote,
Nietzsche, more than once, to the effect the wasteland
grows, woe to him who harbors wastelands within.
To that, I'd like to add that if desertification occurs
within, the green world of nature cannot really survive
without, because soul and habitat, we're finally
in a position to understand this, our correlates of one another.
It's not by accident then that the wasteland figures
as one of the dominant emblems or landscapes
of modernist literature from T.S. Eliot's poem
to Dino Bootzati's desece de de tatte,
and we've been taught, among others, by Eliot himself
to read the wasteland as a testimony of despair
over a civilization in spiritual decay.
But that's only one aspect of the testimony.
Poetry doesn't monitor only the spiritual states of being
or what one used to call the spirit of an age.
It also registers the spiritual effects
of a changing climate and habitat.
As the external environment undergoes transformations,
poets often announce them in advance
with the clear voice of seers for poets, or at least some of them,
have an altogether six cents which enables them
to forecast trends in the weather.
Like oracles, they may couch that message
in the language of a nigma.
And like oracles, the meaning of their message
becomes fully manifest only after the events
it foretells have unfolded.
So modern poetry at its best is a kind of spiritual ecology.
The wasteland grows within and without
and with no essential distinction between them.
So much so that we might say that a poem like T.S. Eliot's
the wasteland is in some ways a harbinger of the greenhouse
effect.
Or better, we can say that the greenhouse effect,
or desertification of habitat in general,
is the true objective, correlative of the poem.
But poets are not all reliable in this regard.
In retrospect, it seems to me that a modernist writer
like James Joyce, whose literature exploited
the almost limitless potential of the sayable,
never really heated the nature of the times.
His luxuriant prose doesn't grow in the desiccated ground
of the modern habitat, but rather in some garden of nostalgia.
His work thrives on planetitude, the planetitude of nature,
of the body, the planetitude of the erotic,
of meaningfulness in every dimension, of being.
The planetitude of the word, by contrast, the bleak,
essentialist literature of a writer like Samuel Beckett
seems truly to reflect or at least pre-announced
the changing climate of the times.
And in his case, Beckett's case, the ecology of the sayable
is reduced to an authentic poverty.
And this is confirmed by James Nolsen, who
wrote a biography of Samuel Beckett called Damned to Fame,
in which he, James Nolsen, reports a conversation
that he had with Samuel Beckett, where Beckett,
if we believe Nolsen said the following.
I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could go
in the direction of knowing more, being in control
of one's material.
He was always adding to it.
You only have to look at his proofs to see that.
I realized that my own way was in impoverishment
in lack of knowledge, in subtracting, rather than adding.
And I think that's very well said on Beckett's part.
And it leads me to conclude that the failure of Beckett's
word to flourish in any grand sense
reveals in that minimal flower of his poetry and drama
the depleted resources of the ground that lies outside the writer's window.
Now this window of the soul, if you want to call it that,
appears in one of Beckett's plays as one
of the bleakest mirrors in modernist literature.
I'm thinking here of the play Endgame, where
ham periodically asks Clove to look out of the window of their room,
and each time he does so, Clove reports that nothing has changed,
the habitat lies wasted, devoid of trees, or signs of life.
And somewhere in the middle of the play,
ham is musing aloud to Clove, and he says the following,
I once knew a madman who thought the end of the world had come.
He was a painter and engraver.
I had a great fondness for him.
I used to go and see him in the asylum.
I'd taken by the hand and dragged him to the window.
Look there.
All that rising corn and there, look, the sails of the herring fleet,
all that loveliness.
He'd snatch away his hand and go back into his corner.
A pauled, all he had seen was ashes.
I'm tempted to see in this artist or madman a figure of Beckett himself
who had lived through the Second World War,
had queued awareness of living in the aftermath
of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the smoke of Auschwitz.
And Beckett strikes me as someone who you could take back
to his native homeland of Ireland and show him
all the green of the rolling hills,
but he would turn away a pauled because all he would have seen is ashes.
Endgame is clearly written after the events in question.
And like many of Beckett's works, it dramatizes an end that cannot come to an end,
an end that is endlessly prolonged,
because after the calamities and catastrophes of the 21st century,
one would think that this has to be the absolute apocalyptic end of history,
but history is cruel like the month of April,
and so far as it doesn't quite die a final death,
but it keeps dragging on and gives us lie-lax out of the radioactive ground of history.
So whatever the nature of the end in Beckett's vision,
it does drag on indefinitely.
This failure of the modern era to achieve the end of that which is already over.
Be it the faith and redemption in humanism, in history, in progress, or man,
all this is part of the phenomenon that we call nihilism.
That word nihilism has a root nee-heal which in Latin means nothing,
and it's that which is left over after the story is over yet continues to drag on.
In Beckett's work, the nee-heal refers, among other things,
to the absence of a grammatical tense to describe this strange set of affairs.
And here I'm alluding to part one of Beckett's novel, Maloy,
where the narrator, Maloy, who is agelessly old,
and whose decrepit life cannot come to an end, says,
"My life, my life.
Now I speak of it as something over, now as of a joke, which still goes on."
And it is neither.
For at the same time, it is over, and it goes on.
And is there any tense for that?
If there were a tense for that, we could call it the, well, two options come to my mind.
We could call it the decaying circus tense, referring to something that Maloy says about his own
testicles in their rotten bag, the right lower than the left one, or inversely,
I forget decaying circus clowns, or maybe one could call it the ruined tense,
watch wound and buried by the watchmaker before he died, whose ruined works will one day speak of God
to the worms.
Or perhaps one could call it the decomposed sense.
And here again, I'm thinking of another passage in Maloy, where
Maloy is clearly referring to the whole history of literature at the end of which, or,
let's say, beyond the end of which he believed he was writing, because if literature had not already
come to an end in the 19th century, I believe that Beckett believed it had come to an end to
consummation at least with James Joyce, and that to write in the wake, no pun intended of James
Joyce was to write in a kind of posthumous mode where all one could do is decompose the history
of what literature had composed over the centuries.
And I'm going to revert again to something that our character, Maloy, says in part one of the novel
Maloy, where he writes, "But it is only since I have ceased to live that I think of these things
and the other things. It is in the tranquility of decomposition that I remember the long,
confused emotion which was my life, and that I judge it as it is said that God will judge me,
and with no less impertinence. To decompose as to live to, I know, I know, don't torment me,
but one sometimes forgets."
So the decomposition as the minimalist vocation of a writer after the end is a typical of Beckett
who really tried throughout his post-war works in all genres to unwrite the history of literature
as opposed to his master and friend James Joyce who was always rewriting the history of
literature, adding to it, providing a surplus to it, giving it even more fullness and meaning
than it had before. I think it's perceptive of Beckett to realize that one cannot go any further
in that direction than Joyce had gone and that now being more in touch with the times, it was the
time for subtraction and diminution and decomposition. Now the absence of a tense for that which is
over and still drags on is, of course, resonant in a novel like Maloy insofar as Maloy is the first
part of a trilogy of novels that Beckett wrote between 1951 and 1953, the first part being
Maloy, the second part is Malone dies, the third is the unnameable which famously ends with the line,
"I can't go on, I will go on." And here too one has to go back to this question of how does one go on
after the end and how far can one go in decomposition? Well in Beckett's case, so many of his
characters are in a state of physical decomposition which is actually makes the whole dynamic all
the more interesting. This is certainly the case when it comes to the character of Maloy and I've
invoked him several times. So let me dwell a little bit on this novel of the first part of the
trilogy Maloy and if you will permit me to quote at length from it profusely, I think that it will be able to
show us its aesthetic of decomposition rather than me telling you about it. Again the novel is in two
parts, the first part is narrated as a long interior monologue by a character named Maloy who is a
vagrant who is extremely old as I mentioned, who suffers from a number of infirmities, his legs are stiff,
one worse than the other and as we follow him on a kind of odyssey as he attempts to make his way back
home to his mother in part one, his legs get more and more handicapped and he ends up actually having to
grovel through a forest at the end of part one of the two-part novel. The second part I'll say
something about later, part one of Maloy is ostensibly about Maloy's attempts to make it home to his
mother and we get a sense that he's been on this journey, circular journey or this attempt to
close the circle by going back to his own point of origin many many times before and that it even though he
has succeeded in making it back to his mother he doesn't succeed, hasn't succeeded yet to
settle the matter with my mother as he calls it, he keeps using that phrase, I would like to
liquidate this matter of my mother obviously punning on the shared edamond of those two words of
mother and matter, Mattea and Mattea in Latin and let's not imagine that Freud and his
edible theories are going to be of much help here in fact Maloy tells us and if I'm ever reduced
to looking for a meaning to my life you can never tell, it's in that old mess I'll stick my nose to
begin with the mess of that poor old uniparous horror and myself the last of my foul breed,
neither man nor beast. So getting home to his mother is not really going to bring this story to an end,
it's just going to drag it on a little bit longer. Nevertheless part one of Maloy does tell the story
of this journey and it begins the action if you want to call it that begins with Maloy's resolve
to get himself underway, he takes his crutches with him and he attaches them on his bicycle
and his bicycle in the beginning of his journey is his main means of locomotion, he will
subsequently lose his bicycle and walk with his crutches and at the end he will not be able even to
stand up on crutches and will be actually groveling on the ground at the moment of extremity towards
the end. So early on as he sets out he approaches a town which has an ordinance that bicyclists
must dismount before they enter the town and Maloy tries judiciously to do that but he obviously
does something wrong because he's hailed by a policeman and I will quote here,
but a little further on I heard myself hailed, I raised my head and saw a policeman
elliptically speaking for it was only later by way of induction or deduction I forget which
that I knew what it was. What are you doing there? He said, I'm used to that question, I understood
it immediately. Resting I said, resting he said, resting I said, "Will you answer my question?"
He cried. So it always is when I'm reduced to confabulation I honestly believe I have answered the
question I am asked and in reality I do nothing of the kind. I won't reconstruct the conversation
in all its meanderings. It ended in my understanding that my way of resting, my attitude when at rest
astride my bicycle, my arms on the handlebars, my head on my arms was a violation of I don't know what
public order public decency.
Modesty I pointed to my crutches and ventured one or two noises regarding my infirmity which obliged me
to rest as I could rather than as I should. But there are not two laws. That was the next thing I
thought I understood not two laws one for the healthy another for the sick but one only to which all
must bow rich and poor young and old happy and sad. He was eloquent I pointed it out that I was not sad.
That was a mistake. Your papers he said I knew it a moment later. Not at all I said not at all.
Your papers he cried. Ah my papers. Now the only papers I carry with me are bits of newspaper to wipe
myself you understand when I have a stool. Oh I don't say I wipe myself every time I have a stool
no but I like to be in a position to do so if I have to nothing strange about that it seems to me.
In a panic I took this paper from my pocket and thrust it under his nose.
The weather was fine. We took the little side streets quiet sunlit ice bringing along between my crutches.
That is vintage back in there. The weather was fine we took the little side streets.
The police officer is hauling him off to the police station.
Arresting him for his improper mode of resting a stride is bicycle.
That scene is quite humorous and you know when one deals with Beckett the standard line of insiders
is always to remind us that Beckett is very funny, very humorous and indeed there is a lot of
humor in Beckett. However the humor is not an end in itself and oftentimes I think that the humor
makes the tragic undertones of what's going on all the more abysmal and dark and in fact
I think oftentimes people laugh when they read or see Beckett in the theater as a way of defending
themselves against a very dark and threatening message that's coming from the philosophy of his work.
I've seen Endgame a few times where the audience is so nervous because of the nihilism of the vision
that any little excuse any little gesture will make them laugh but it's a very nervous
unsettled laughter. So yes there is humor in Beckett but let's see what is actually going on in the
subtext here. His conversation with the policeman is probably not a conversation in any ordinary
sense of the term. We have to imagine someone who is very much out of it who is what
a vagrant and who probably is just making something like growling noises or some inarticulate sounds
and we know from passages subsequent to this one exactly how Beckett thinks he's communicating but
is actually not communicating at all with other people and I can read here where he says
"Yes the words I heard and heard distinctly having quite a sensitive ear. They were heard
a first time then a second and often a third as pure sounds free of all meaning." In other words
there's nothing wrong with his sense of hearing. He can in the physical sense. He hears the words
but he doesn't hear them as words. He hears them as sounds and this is probably one of the reasons
why conversation was unspeakably painful to me and the words I uttered and which must nearly
always have gone with an effect and effort of the intelligence were often to me as the buzzing of an
insect and this is perhaps one of the reasons I was so untalkative. I mean this trouble I had in
understanding not only what others said to me but also what I said to them.
So here I think the novel is drawing attention to the role that hearing plays in our
understanding ourselves not only in intersubjective communication but when it comes to
the act of understanding in a way that perhaps the French, the connection is stronger in French where
the verb entente to hear is related to the verb to understand. Therefore in French a
"malant entreux" is a misunderstanding. It's literally a mishearing of something.
And the role that hearing plays in this novel as well as the subsequent two novels of the trilogy
is of course could not be more prominent. In fact as we proceed through this trilogy
the characters or the narrators in their interior monologues become so decomposed in their bodies
that in the final analysis it's not even clear that they have any real bodies in any real sense at
all and they are just a consciousness full of voices that they're hearing inside their heads.
And we can go more in depth into the kind of voices that Maloy will hear inside his head
in a moment but I'd like to go back to the scene with the encounter with the policeman as
Maloy is being hauled off to the police station because it's there that the question of his name
comes up. He cannot quite remember his name and this presents him with somewhat of a problem and a
dilemma because the law knows identity by names and it's not by chance that it's in the police
station that the question of his name comes up because after all his name is Maloy and if you're
reading this novel in the language in which it was originally written which was in French
I'm reading from an English translation by Beckett who collaborated with Patrick Boyle's to
to translate it but nevertheless Beckett did write this in French and a French reader would
hear in the name Maloy in the second syllable "Loy or Loire" the word "Laudois" or the law in French.
So it's in the police station that he can't remember his name but then all of a sudden he does
and I quote and suddenly I remembered my name, "Maloy". My name is Maloy I cried all of a sudden now I
remember. Nothing compelled me to give this information but I gave it hoping to please I suppose.
They let me keep my hat on I don't know why. Is it your mother's name said the sergeant?
It must have been a sergeant. "Maloy I cried my name is Maloy."
"Is that your mother's name?" said the sergeant. "What?" I said. "Your name is Maloy," said the sergeant.
"Yes I said now I remember and your mother said the sergeant. I didn't follow. Is your mother's name
"Maloy 2" said the sergeant? I thought it over. "Your mother" said the sergeant is your mother's
let me think I cried. At least I imagine that's how it was. "Take your time," said the sergeant.
"Was mother's name Maloy?" "Very likely. Her name must be Maloy 2" I said.
And with that they take him away to the guard room and eventually they release him and this little
episode in Maloy comes to a provisional sort of conclusion when Maloy says the following
that what is certain is this that I never rested in that way again my feet obscenely resting on the earth
my arms on the handlebars and on my arms my head rocking and abandoned.
And if you visualize that posture I think you'll agree with me that it forms a cross and that
in that posture there's an evocation of a Christ figure here in Maloy.
And that's perhaps why Beckett goes on to tell his Christian nation, Christian society of readers
It is indeed a deplorable sight, a deplorable example for the people who so need to be encouraged
in their bitter toil and to have before their eyes manifest strength manifestations of strength only
of courage and of joy without which they might collapse at the end of the day and roll on the ground.
In other words become like Maloy themselves. That's the danger, that's the threat that Maloy represents.
To others is the fear that there but by the grace of God go I.
There are a number of
Christian illusions in Maloy like they're
are in all of Beckett's work and I'm not sure I have a thesis on how things stand or stood
with Beckett's relationship to Christianity. But I think that there are two things I would draw attention to.
One is the relationship between this background noise, this
buzzing that Maloy hears in his head and what it means in our relationship with human beings to God.
But before we go directly into that issue, the question that it also raises is how does Beckett
import that noise, that buzzing of an insect that is inside the consciousness of his narrator
into a text? Well he does it by transcribing into intelligible words a great quotient of nonsense
without ever being nonsensical in the grammatical sense of the term.
What I admire most about Beckett is that he never descended to the easy forms of nonsense,
which is the distortion of grammar, the subversion of syntax, the kind of word play, all that kind
of cheap avant-gardeish experimentation with the very linguistic medium itself is something that
Beckett never really descended to his prose even when it is the most impenetrably difficult to
to make sense of metaphysically is always of an extraordinary limpidity certainly in Maloy.
So he does find a way to transcribe into intelligible words what that noise inside a
a deranged consciousness which is supposed to also be our consciousness by the way what it's really like.
And that might also explain why part one of Maloy is only it has two paragraphs. The first paragraph
is a page and a half, the whole rest of the narrative of part one which is 120 pages plus is all one
kind of continuous paragraph making it very difficult to find a passage when you're trying to quote it
by the way but nevertheless that's one way where the formlessness has actually taken on a
correlative in the mode of composition or of decomposition. So on the other issue of the
way in which noise is an interference not only in intersubjective communication where Beckett thinks
he's saying one thing and he's actually not saying that at all and he's being misunderstood and he's
not really understanding what others are telling him. It gets raised to a higher more philosophical
level later in the narrative where Maloy after this he leaves a police station a number of things
happen to him he runs over a dog with his bicycle as soon as he leaves the police station this dog is
owned by a woman whose name he can't remember either her name is Loy or Lows. He calls her at a certain
point. Sophie or Christian name Lows Loy is this actually Beckett's I mean sorry Maloy's mother
without Maloy realizing it. Well certainly she might be a Mrs. Loy her name Lows later he'll talk about
the lousy genes that he got from his mother and he does end up this woman does not want to press
charges against Maloy. She actually brings him home and obliges him to bury her dog in the garden
and then Maloy spends several months if not longer with this woman before he finally takes off again
and finds himself at a seashore and then in a what he calls a dark and towering forest and the meantime
his the condition of his legs has gotten a lot worse and he ends up having to
gravel through this primordial space of the forest and it's there where in his the depths of his
misery and objection he is tempted to commit suicide and the reason he doesn't commit suicide
is because he hears voices in his head that he calls imperatives and for some reason he feels that he
cannot ignore an imperative and so he says but I could not stay in the forest I was not free too
that is to say I could have physically nothing could have been easier but I was not purely physical
I lacked something and I would have had the feeling if I stayed in the forest of going against
an imperative at least I had that impression but perhaps I was mistaken perhaps I would have been
better advised to stay in the forest perhaps I could have stayed there without remorse
without the painful impression of committing a fault almost a sin for I have greatly sinned at all times
greatly sinned against my prompters for my loi sending is not a problem he uh I he's sinned plenty
in this life so what is the problem and he says imperatives however are a little different
and I have always been inclined to submit to them I don't know why for they never led me anywhere
and tore me from places where if all was not well all was no worse than anywhere else
and then went silent leaving me stranded so I knew my imperatives well and yet I submitted to them
yes these imperatives were quite explicit and even detailed until having set me in motion at last
they began to falter then went silent leaving me there like a fool who neither knows where he is going
nor why he is going there
and that is one of the most radical summations of what we would call absurdity
that there is a voice in one's head that is giving you a commandment and that voice is not coming
from inside yourself is coming from outside of the cloister of your consciousness a voice which you
take to be the voice of God and it's telling you to do something and once it sets you into motion
it falls silent and leaves you wondering what was the purpose of that injunction
didn't have a person purpose at all or was it it's purpose only to keep this story going
in a futile manner
so he goes on to say that that voice deserted me prematurely and he says that even if the voice
could have carried me to the very scene of action namely to my mother even then I might well have
succeeded no better because of the other obstacles barring my way and in this command which
falter then died it was hard not to hear the unspoken treaty don't do it my boy don't do it my
boy in other words don't commit suicide and this don't do it my boy is that thou shall not
it's what someone like Jacques Lacquer calls Lu Nonde du Pére the know of the father the law
coming to say no and this same voice tells him don't do it my boy help is on its way
so he hears that some voice telling him that don't fret my boy help is on its way
and there's something that has to be at least relatively true
about that communication because we know by the end of the narrative that Maloy actually
stumbles outside of this forest and after he has heard this voice telling him not to fret
he says that help was coming then he stumbles out of the forest which ends has a ditch surrounding
it at its edge and he tumbles into that ditch and there is where he stays as he says it in the last
sentence of his interior monologue Maloy could stay where he happened to be however if we go back to
the beginning the very beginning of his narrative it begins by saying I am in my mother's room
it's I who live there now I don't know how I got there perhaps in an ambulance certainly a vehicle
of some kind I was helped I'd never have gotten there alone
what kind of help does Maloy receive is he saved and rescued in some Christian sense of the term
that's a question that we can't answer before we look briefly at part two of the narrative coming up
[Music]
Part two of Maloy changes a scene we don't have the same narrator we have a narrator named Moran
Jack Moran and he is his big boss his name Yudhi and Yudhi communicates to Moran through his messenger
gabber these are not in different names obviously Yudhi as some you have to hear Yahweh in that name
and Gabor the angel Gabriel so it seems that Moran is in under some sort of orders from God to
undertake a search for Maloy and to rescue him or at least to bring him to safety and so Gabor comes
to Moran's house a little bourgeois house and it's always thirsty as Gabor wanting beer and says
that Yudhi wants you to go out and find Maloy so Moran leaves his house with his son Jacques and looks
and undertakes a kind of search which ends up strangely contaminating his own sanity with the
marks of the consciousness of Maloy himself and therefore we are left as readers not really knowing
what to make of the relationship between part one and part two of Maloy because Moran is
there's some suggestion that Moran sets out as a sane individual and that by the end of his
his little odyssey which ends up significantly in a dark forest as well that he has actually
degenerated into Maloy but then on the other hand there are suggestions that the relationship
between Maloy and Moran is that of a son to father because there's a lot of language of
paternity and lineage and genealogy and therefore we wonder what is what is the what what are
the relations between part one and part two the one thing that we can be sure of is that they
are not relations of symmetry and of correspondence this despite the fact that Maloy is
obsessed with symmetry or as he's put it I've always had a mania for symmetry at a certain point he
steals an object from Sophie Louss' house and it's a little we know it we know it's a knife rest
Maloy has no idea what it is all he knows is that it's a little silver object that is perfectly
symmetrical on on either side and the symmetry of it in chance him and it and it gives him peace
in his soul it brings him a serenity and he believes that it is beyond understanding and because it's
beyond understanding peace finally comes into his soul and there's other indications that he has
a mania for for symmetry there's a charcoal burner that he meets in the forest and he actually
whom he actually kills by hitting him in the head and then he he he hits him with his crutches
from both sides because of his mania for symmetry there's also a famous scene of him collecting 16
stones on the beach because he liked to suck stones and he has four pockets and it goes on for about
ten pages describing how he tried to find a system of distribution of these stones that would
preserve a certain symmetry where you have 16 stones circulating through four pockets but he
it ends in a kind of abject failure because he cannot find an even mode of distribution and this
actually hurts him in his soul we also know that Maloy has two legs but that one leg is longer than
the other I read a passage where his testicles one droops more than the other therefore symmetry
is not part of the decomposing body of Maloy the character and the same way that symmetry is not a
principle that really applies to the relationship between part one and part two of the narrative however there
is a at least a a certain horizon of similarity and correspondence that can and that enables us to relate
part one and part two according to motifs and one of the most important motifs in my view is that
again of hearing because Moran actually needs to hear the orders of Yudhi from the messenger
Gabor who is at least a personification and this voice comes to him from another person as it were
whereas in Maloy these these commandments are already internalized and in fact towards the end of his
Odyssey Moran will tell us that he actually began hearing voices in his head and that he ignored them
so at the first but nevertheless let me draw attention to the passage which I think in many ways
brings Maloy to a kind of culmination here and Moran has set out as a healthy and sane individual
more or less and towards the end he has he's starting to lose his sanity he's also his legs have
gotten very stiff and he's handicapping is almost paralyzed and he is really kind of stuck in the forest
and he at a certain point he loses his keys and he goes looking for them in the forest and low and behold
while looking in this way for my keys I found an ear which I threw into the coats an uncommon
to sentence there I always have found that to be hugely significant that he finds an ear at least
alerting us to the fact that something is going to transpire through the sense of hearing once again
and in his moment of extremity he's visited by gabber in the forest and the following exchange takes place
he must be angry with me I said Moran says to gabber do you know what he told me the other day said gabber
has he changed I cried change said gabber no he hasn't changed why would he have changed he's getting old that's all like the world
you have a queer voice this evening I said I do not think he heard me well he said drawing his hands once
moreover is just downwards I'll be going if that's all you have to say to me he went without saying goodbye
but I overtook him in spite of my loathing forum in spite of my weakness and my sick leg and I held
him back by the sleeve what did he tell you I said he stopped Moran he said you are beginning to
give me a serious pain in the arse for pity's sake I said tell me what he told you he gave me a
shove I fell he had not intended to make me fall he did not realize the state I was in he had only
wanted to push me away I did not try to get up I let a roar he came and bent over me he had a walrus
mustache chestnut in color I saw it lift the lips open and almost at the same time I heard words of
solicitude at a great distance he was not brutal gabber I knew him well gabber I said it's not much
I'm asking you I remember this scene well he wanted to help me I pushed him away I was all right
where I was what did he tell you I said I don't understand said gabber you were saying a minute
ago that he told you something I said then I cut you short short said gabber do you know what he
told me the other day I said those were your very words his face lit up the clawed was just about
as quick as my son he said to me said gabber gabber he said louder I cried he said to me said gabber
gabber he said life is a thing of beauty gabber and a joy forever that is the message that comes
from beauty to meringue via the intermediary gabber life is a thing of beauty gabber and a joy forever
well how about that
this communication from Yahweh or God is all the more disturbing in French where
it's not life is a thing of beauty in French it's la viet inui that word inui has in it the
sense of hearing of the the we and inui means literally something that is surd that cannot be
that is unheard it's a kind of it's it's the very phenomenon of absurdity is in the
phoneme itself la viet inui I continue he brought his face near her mind a joy forever he said a
thing of beauty meringue and a joy forever he smiled I closed my eyes smiles are all very nice in
their own way very heartening but at a reasonable distance I said do you think he meant human life
I listened perhaps he didn't mean human life I said I opened my eyes I was alone
and that's the question we're left with whether our communication with God is whether these channels
of communication are doom to a kind of misunderstanding because there's too much interfering noise
and maybe it's the messenger himself who is distorting the message or maybe the the god in question
as a singular disregard for human suffering and maybe this message of the joy forever is something that
is intended cruelly or it's intended as some kind of reminder not to despair don't do it
my loy and so forth it's not an issue that we can decide all that easily it's really a
question of where we think Beckett stands vis-a-vis the question of God where God has obviously
abandoned history or abandoned the world in this moment of history and whether he will ever
return or not might be an open question however whether God is cruel benign, surred or merely
absent the undeniable fact is that we continue to hear in our own minds and our own consciousness
these voices that would if nothing else be the echoes of a dead god and this voice is also a
certain call of conscience and molloy says subsequent to the passage I read I have spoken of a voice
giving me orders or rather advice it was on my way home I heard it for the first time I paid no
attention to it so this is the first time he's hearing this voice of you the in his own mind without
the intermediary of gay boy and then at the very end of his own narrative in part two he
after returning to his house in a very sorry state he recovers his garden and he realizes that the birds
there had not been killed that they were wild birds and yet quite trusting I'm reading from the
text here I recognize them and they seem to recognize me but one never knows I tried to understand
their language better he says without having recourse to mine they were the longest lovely estate
I lived in the garden I have spoken of a voice telling me things I was getting to know it better now to
understand what it wanted it did not use the words that Moran had been taught when he was little and
that he in his turn had taught to his little one so that at first I did not know what it wanted
but in the end I understood this language I understood it I understand all wrong perhaps that is
not what matters it told me to write the report this is the report we've been reading by the way
does that mean I am freer now than I was I do not know I shall learn then I went back into the house
and wrote it is midnight the rain is beating on the windows it was not midnight it was not raining
we'll be right back
Thank you.
[Music]
I mentioned the word method because we have to ask what kind of forward progress
my lawyer is making in this manner and all we know is that my lawyer has to be wary of day
carts advice in the discourse on method which believe it or not my lawyer has read in fact he's read a lot
of things in the history of philosophy strangely enough but certainly he's read section three of the
discourse on method where Descartes talks about a traveler being lost and a forest and says that if a
traveler finds himself lost in a forest he should not walk this way or that he should rather choose an arbitrary
direction whichever and walk in as straight a line as possible without swerving one way or another
and that if you follow that straight line through the forest you will eventually get out of the
forest and be better off wherever you end up than you would be in the middle of the forest but
my lawyer has read other things as well and he says quote and having heard or more probably read somewhere
in the days when I thought I would be well advised to educate myself or amuse myself or
stupefied myself or kill time that when a man in a forest thinks he's going forward in a straight
line in reality he is going in a circle I did my best to go in a circle hoping in this way to go in a
straight line and if I did not go in a rigorous restraint line with my system of going in a circle
at least I did not go in a circle and that was something
so by going in a circle he hopes to go in a straight line
and reach the end of the road but we know that his movement is neither
linear or circular because this is not the kind of geometry that applies to a
Maloiz world his movement is rather like that grammatical tense that doesn't exist to describe a life
that is over and that nevertheless drags on that ruined tense or that decaying circus clown tense
or the decomposed sense tense but the question that I'll leave you with to conclude is whether it
really is a forest that Maloiz grovels through in his last defzpert attempt to make an end of it all
and the answer to that question comes in part two when we learn from Moran
that Maloiz could hardly have been lost in a forest at most it was simply a meager clump of trees
because the native region of Maloiz wandering is in a essence a wasteland. Moran says quote the land
did not lend itself to cultivation the pastures in spite of the torrential rains were exceedingly
meager and strewn with boulders here only kitchweed grew in abundance and a curious bitter blue
grass fatal to cows and horses that is the revealed truth of Maloiz landscape it's really his forest
is a wasteland so as I mentioned at the end of his narrative Maloiz indicates that the forest
ends up in a ditch how are we to understand that ditch is it a sign of human cultivation of a grave
hard to say in any case it's a boundary and this is the ditch in which his journey comes to a
provisional end and again what kind of end that is we don't know but in the distance Maloiz sees the
steeples and towers of a town but he makes no effort to get out of the ditch Maloiz could stay
he says where he happened to be help is apparently on the way but history and this means our history
as well meanwhile will remain where it is this is Robert Harrison for entitled opinions
will be with you sometime in the future thanks for listening
[Music]