For the uninitiated, the concept of studying, or even reading Samuel Beckett is a daunting one, not least because of the fact that few, if any, or his works follow our concept of traditional or mainstream literature.
Company (John Calder Limited, 1980, ISBN 0-7145-3857-4), then, may seem like one of the worst of his works to study, and for good reason. To the untrained reader, Company appears to be one of the most abstract and confusing texts in the world – indeed, even to the trained literary critic, it can seem the same.
Company: Beckett’s Autobiography
Company is, however, one of Beckett’s most deep and thoughtful works, and one which poses serious questions about our own existence. It is widely held to be Beckett’s own version of an autobiography; as many of the recollections of the subject’s past in Company are known to be those of Beckett’s own childhood. After this there is no real certainty about Company, only that through its twisting and turning language it leads us to question its own point as a work of fiction.
Forcing us to confront our own conceptions of fiction and literature – and about our own existence, as well – is what Beckett does best. One novel which perhaps achieves this better than any is Molloy, a story of two halves which follows the rambling and almost insane experiences of the character Molloy himself, and of his ‘pursuer’ Moran. Through the regularly surreal and absurd narrative of this physically crippled man, the reader is led through the maze of Molloy’s thoughts and ideas, and has to follow him in the seemingly impossible search for his mother.
In Molloy, Beckett’s meaning is much clearer than in his later works such as Company, despite being thoroughly oblique and confusing nonetheless.
Background to Samuel Beckett
Beckett also displays his wide reading of philosopher’s through his literature. Two of the most iconic passages from Molloy have clear references to the ‘father’ of modern philosophy, French seventeenth century philosopher Rene Descartes. In Molloy, Beckett mocks Descartes’ use of mathematics to attempt to prove the existence of man and the world around him. Instead, Molloy spends his time using maths to count his own farts and to suck stones, two exercises which Molloy eventually denounces as “nothing”, revealing Beckett’s own suspicions of any philosophy that tires to force absolute certainties of fact upon us.
Molloy often repeats the phrase that: “the truth is I don’t know” and this is the overriding message of Beckett’s Molloy, in that whatever we take to be a truth or a certainty is not so at all. Through his work then, Beckett is exploring the question of what truth is, and how we can take anything as certain. He never proposes an answer of course, but then that would not make his work what it is: an exercise in deconstruction.
Matthew Tanner - I am a BA (Hons) Journalism and English Literature student at the University of Portsmouth (U.K). As part of my degree programme I will ...
