Intertextuality in "The Lost Ones"

Le dépeupleur (Paris: Minuit, 1970), translated into English as The Lost Ones (London: Calder & Boyars, 1972), is a text in fifteen paragraphs, which may be summarized as follows:

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Part I: The Abode

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The ‘first aperçu of the abode’ in which ‘lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one.’ The paragraph is structured by a series of headings or ‘stage directions’ (characteristic of Beckett’s later style): ‘The light’; ‘The temperature’; ‘The ladders’; ‘The niches or alcoves’. The initial description of the shape of the cylindrical abode is followed by an account of the light, its restless oscillation and its ‘consequences’, then an account of the temperature, its oscillation and its consequences, then a section on the sounds, then the ladders, and finally the niches to which the lost ones are entitled to climb.

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2. The bodies are divided into four kinds – those constantly in motion, those who sometimes pause, the sedentary, and the vanquished. The latter are closest to the final state of ‘this little people’ (‘ce petit peuple’), in which ‘light and climate will be changed in a way impossible to foretell. But the former may be imagined extinguished as purposeless and the latter fixed not far from freezing point’.

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3. A resumé of what has been expounded so far with some new precisions.

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Part II: The Creeds

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4. The two rival beliefs about ‘a way out’. ‘One school swears by a secret passage branching from one of the tunnels and leading in the words of the poet to nature’s sanctuaries. The other dreams of a trapdoor hidden in the hub of the ceiling giving access to a flue at the end of which the sun and other stars would still be shining’.

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5. The possibility of a cooperative venture to search the ceiling, the ‘inviolable zenith’, a possibility thwarted by the absence of ‘fraternity’ among the searchers.

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Part III: The Code

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6. A first aperçu of the climbers’ code’, based on ‘the fundamental principle forbidding ascent more than one at a time’. This long paragraph is followed by three particularly short ones:

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7. The rule for the transport of ladders within a belt along the wall.

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8. The ‘sedentary searchers’ and four of the five ‘vanquished’ within this belt.

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9. A further belt at the edge of the arena where some searchers scrutinize those in the outer belt, creating ‘two narrow rings turning in opposite directions about the teeming precinct’.

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Part IV: Recapitulation

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10. An augmentation of the details about the bodies given in paragraph 2: their age and sex, their different states, their number: 5 vanquished, 20 sedentary, 60 who pause, and 120 constantly moving.

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11. The light and then the temperature, augmenting the summary description in paragraph 1.

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12. The movements between the three zones, augmenting the information given in paragraphs 8 and 9.

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Part V: Further Augmentation

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13. The effect of the climate on the soul, the skin, the eye of the searchers, augmenting elements from paragraphs 1 and 11. Love-making in this climate: ‘The spectacle then is one to be remembered of frenzies prolonged in pain and hopelessness far beyond what even the most gifted lovers can achieve in camera’.

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14. Augmentation of the climbers’ movements and code, as in 8, 9 and 12. The dim light, making the niches invisible from below, the role of ‘the woman vanquished’ who ‘squats against the wall’ as a point of orientation, and the ‘ethics’ of examining one another’s faces: ‘not to do unto others what coming from them might give offence’.

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Part VI: Imagining the End

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15. Added in 1970, four years after the composition of the rest, this paragraph envisages the last searcher staring into the face of the woman vanquished as ‘the unthinkable end’ closes in. This confers a rather specious 'closure' on the text by visualizing what had been presented so far as completely unknowable, ‘impossible to foretell’ (par. 2).

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David Taylor informs me that this text was first published as a series of separate paragraphs in various high-class reviews, illustrated by leading artists, under titles such as ‘Ladder Law’ (par. 6) and ‘The North’ (par. 14). One suspects here a case of making a mountain out of a molehill, or the mischievous charlatanism of a writer who knows that his every word will be the topic of alert and devoted commentary. The later Beckett writes in constant awareness of the lynx-like readers, teasing and setting traps for them, while affecting to be utterly oblivious of their existence. The later Henry James, Joyce and T. S. Eliot are past masters of the same game, a game that can be played only by authors of assured fame, with a critical industry growing up about them. Other esoteric modernists such as Mallarmé or Pound do not play this game; they have not entered into such a cat-and-mouse symbiosis with their public. One aspect of this game is seen in the confusion Beckett creates about the dimensions of the cylinder (the English translation correcting the French original) and the number of its inhabitants; it must be 205, yet Beckett sometimes writes as if it were 200: if the fifteen ladders were put out of service, ‘the spectacle would finally be offered of one hundred and eighty-five searchers less the vanquished committed for all time to the ground’ (par. 6); the correct figure here would be 190. Does Beckett deliberately stumble to offer something for the critics to feed on?

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A Parody of Dante

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The Lost Ones is one of the most plainly intertextual of all Beckett’s performances, being a parody of Dante’s Inferno. Dante is named in the text (par. 2) and the last line of the Commedia – ‘the love that moves the sun and the other stars’ – is quoted: ‘a flue at the end of which the sun and the other stars would still be shining’ (‘une cheminée au bout de laquelle brilleraient encore le soleil et les autres étoiles’, par. 4). The flue corresponds to the subterranean gallery, the ‘natural burella’ and ‘pertugio tondo’ (Inf. 34.98, 138) by which Virgil and Dante make their way back from the bottom of Hell at the centre of the earth.

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The Lost Ones is the text that marks the arrival of the impersonal Olympian style of late Beckett. It is also the strongest exemplar of this style, largely due to the stern Dantean model. Yet, like the poet of the Commedia, the narrator has both a god-like aspect and a searching, doubting human side. As Lawrence Graver writes: ‘Gradually, as we attend to the words cut and then positioned as if each were a precious stone, we hear surprising modulations not apparent at the start. The voice begins to doubt, qualify, and contradict its earlier observations; and from behind the screen of detachment comes the torment of the searching creatures… Time and again, the alien events inside the cylinder… send chills of recognition out to more familiar spheres” (in L. Graver and R. Federman, Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979, 326-7).

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It might be thought that the reference to Belacqua, as well as the shape of the flattened cylinder – closer to the conic shape of Dante’s Mount Purgatory than to the vast and complex geography of Hell with its nine circles, one divided into four gironi, another into ten bolgie and the last into four zone – point to the Purgatorio rather than the Inferno as the relevant intertext. But the title The Lost Ones suggests Dante’s ‘genti dolorose/ch’hanno perduto il ben dell’intelletto’ (unhappy ones who have lost the Good of the intellect; Inf. 3.17-18). Enoch Brater, quoting Beckett’s remark that the ‘purgatory’ of Finnegans Wake ‘is spherical and excludes culmination’, thinks of a purgatorial space in which ‘the ritual of movement offers footfalls only vertical or concentric, never “unidirectional” or end-stopped’ (‘Mis-takes, Mathematical and Otherwise, in The Lost Ones’, Modern Fiction Studies 29, 1983, 93-109; 95).

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A hunt for specific echoes of Dante in Beckett’s text would be a demanding enterprise. The references to light and gloom and to heat and cold recall many passages in Dante. Hell is a place of darkness, from the first circle on: ‘Io venni in loco d’ogni luce muto’ (Inferno 5.28). The ninth circle of Hell is an icy place, where tears are frozen. ‘The bodies brush together with a rustle of dry leaves’ (par. 1) recalls the comparison of lost souls to autumn leaves in Inferno 3.112-13: ‘Come d’autunno si levan le foglie/l’una appresso dell’altra’. Brater (107) sees ‘the two storms’ (par. 11) or ‘twofold storm’ (par. 13), created by the perpetual oscillation of the light and of the temperature, as ‘a postmodernist’s version of those cruel but never-ending winds assaulting Paolo and Francesca’ in Inferno 5.

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The gravity of tone (‘woe the body…’, par. 1; ‘woe the rash searcher’, par. 14) and the features of tautness, quirkiness, ironic wordplay, controlled laconic idiom, and consequent opacity are all close to Dante. The construction of an infernal cosmos recalls the meticulous geometrical proceedings of Dante, and indeed Beckett highlights in Dante’s texts an obsessive concern with control and mapping.

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In the last paragraph, an echo of the Primo Levi title, Se questo è un uomo in ‘si c’est un homme’, ‘si ce fut un homme’ is lost in the English ‘if a man’. This allusion brings the world of Nazi concentration camps into the connotative range of the text. The French title, Le dépeupleur, carries chilling overtones – the depopulator, the depeopler. The cylinder is a machine of death, guaranteeing the total extinction of its population. The bodies in the cylinder are dehumanized by the cold gaze of the ‘intelligence’ observing them. Auschwitz, too, was a depopulator and a depeopler. Beckett plays with the dreary thought that the universe itself is one vast death-camp.

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Such an allusion is in very doubtful taste, but it is one that Beckett could scarcely avoid evoking, in his account of an univers concentrationnaire, any more than the horror of a nuclear holocaust could be kept out of Endgame. The text had to negotiate the connotation in an explicit allusion so as to prevent it being introduced from outside as a potent distraction. Beckett’s allusion manages to connect Dante with concentration camps. There is an abstraction and inhumanity in Dante’s art that troubled Francesco De Sanctis in his Storia della letteratura italiana (1870) and that caused Stephen Dedalus in one of the closing diary entries in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to refer to ‘the spiritual-heroic refrigerating apparatus, invented and patented in all countries by Dante Alighieri’.

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Parody of Science

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The space is vigilantly surveyed by ‘the thinking being coldly intent on all these data’ (par. 11; cf. ‘an intelligence’, par. 10), who constructs the space and observes it like a scientist in a laboratory, advancing hypothetically, as indicated by the recurrent phrase ‘if this notion is maintained’ (par. 10, twice; ‘if it is maintained’, par. 2; ‘as long as it holds’, par. 4), which as the final phrase of the whole text qualifies it in its entirety as a nightmarish supposition about the universe.

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The narrator decides the height and circumference of the cylinder ‘for the sake of harmony’ (‘pour l’harmonie’, par. 1; par. 3) and seems uneasy with some aspects that do not meet this ideal, as in the recurrent phrase ‘without regard to harmony’ (‘de façon peu harmonieuse’, par. 1, twice); ‘with scant regard to harmony’ (‘de façon peu harmonieuse’, par. 15). Generally he is comically admiring of the structure of the cylinder – ‘Such harmony only he can relish whose long experience and detailed knowledge of the niches are such as to permit a perfect mental image of the entire system’ (‘Harmonie que seul peut goûter qui par longue fréquentation connaît au fond l’ensemble des niches au point d’en posséder une image mentale parfaite’, par. 1). But in a paradox reminiscent of Bishop Berkeley, the narrator adds: ‘But it is doubtful that such a one exists’. In the cylinder there is no such observer, but the narrator and the reader have the capacity for such observation – or imagination. The creator and inspector of the cylinder-world commands ‘an unrecognizable perspective in which we are uncomfortable and which transcends the normal human capacities for glance and gaze’ (Brater, 96). But such a perspective is riddled with aporias: ‘the representational coherence of Le Dépeupleur fails in respect of the unspoken and unanswerable question of its production. If what the text says can be accepted as a fictional representation, then its own writing becomes an impossibility’ (Leslie Hill, Beckett’s Fiction, Cambridge University Press, 1990, 155). The paradox suggests the ‘indeterminacy principle’ of contemporary physics. As the narrator combines scientific scruple with an air of authority he uncovers the impossibility of his enterprise.

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There is parody of the social sciences as well. The narrator delights in the perfection of the searchers’ social organization, in accord with ‘conventions of obscure origin which in their precision and the submission which they exact from the climbers resemble laws’ (par. 6); ‘One example among a thousand of the harmony that reigns in the cylinder between order and licence’ (par. 12). Disorder troubles him: ‘Not to mention the intolerable presence of properties serving no purpose’ (par. 6). The hatred of disorder translates into a hatred of life, and the best state of the cylinder is its last, when all life ceases. The cylinder is haunted by the threat of violence, as the narrator lets slip from time to time: ‘The missing rungs are in the hands of a happy few who use them mainly for attack and self-defence’ (‘Les échelons manquants sont entre les mains d’un petit nombre de privilégiés. Ils s’en servent essentiellement pour l’agression ou pour se défendre’, par. 1). While the English vocabulary is sometimes grimmer, ‘c’est toujours la même obligation de la faire jusqu’au bout’ becomes ‘the queue must be suffered to the end’ and ‘fait un queue jusqu’au bout’ becomes ‘suffered one queue to the end’ (par. 12), the French text is perhaps graver and sterner overall, as the quirky elements in the English relieve the stress. The tone of the English is drawn into proximity with Jonathan Swift, heightening the aspect of deadpan irony.

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The style parodies scientific discussion. For instance, ‘a faint stridulence as of insects which is that of the light itself and the one invariable’ (par. 11) recalls the physicists’ identification of background radiation going back to the Big Bang and omnipresent like the light in the cylinder-world (here ‘the one invariable’ has a scientific sound not in the French ‘le seul qui ne varie pas’). The objectifying manner in which the anthropological sciences view humans is another object of parody, as the narration scrutinizes the habitat and mores of the population described.

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The overriding law of this mini-cosmos is entropy, assuring a final state of complete stillness. Thus the meaning that the narrator finds in the various laws he details is overshadowed by ultimate meaninglessness. In addition, the structure and regulation of the cylinder world give scant satisfaction to its inhabitants in their endless quest for their ‘lost ones’. The reader who asks, ‘what is the point of this construction?’ (a question one is also tempted to put to Dante) may be led to put to himself the further question, ‘what is the point of the construction of the universe in which humans actually live?’ The viewpoint of the text is Swiftian rather than Dantesque. It holds the mirror of satire up to humans, but does not offer any theological explanation of their condition.

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Buried Nostalgia

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In the translation of the title, there is a loss of intertextual reference. Le dépeupleur comes from Lamartine’s line ‘Un seul être vous manque et tout est dépeuplé’. The sardonic use of the term ‘son dépeupleur’ in the first line produces a piquant intertextual effect. ‘Séjour ou des corps vont cherchant chacun son dépeupleur’ – it is not souls or hearts who are bereaved but bodies. Yet the movement of the bodies can be interpreted according to a romantic code. ‘Abode where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one’ is more directly romantic, for the sardonic allusion is gone. A buried elegiac mood of romantic longing pervades the text as an elusive perfume.

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Romance is insinuated in sentences such as: ‘One school swears by a secret passage branching from one of the tunnels and leading in the words of the poet to nature’s sanctuaries’ (‘Pour les uns il ne peut s’agir que d’un passage dérobé prenant naissance dans un des tunnels et menant comme dit le poète aux asiles de la nature’, par. 4). The English is a little more melodramatic. Intertextually, a rather Wordsworthian phrase replaces Rousseau’s ‘asiles de la nature’ (‘Je transporterais dans les asiles de la nature des hommes dignes de l’habiter. Je m’en formerais une société charmante…’, Troisième lettre à M. de Malesherbes). The two faiths set in opposition, in ‘nature’s sanctuaries’ and in Dante’s sun and stars, both dying out, correspond to literary Romanticism and Classicism respectively. Classicism is winning, since ‘of these two persuasions the former is declining in favour of the latter but in a manner so desultory and slow and of course with so little effect on the comportment of either sect that to perceive it one must be in the secret of the gods’ (‘de ces deux partis le premier se dégarnit au profit du second. Mais de façon si lente et si peu suivie et bien entendu avec si peu de répercussion sur le comportement des uns et des autres que pour s’en apercevoir il faut être dans le secret des dieux’, par. 4). Note how the words ‘persuasions’ and ‘sect’ bring out the allegorical reference to religious controversy. See also par. 10: ‘the faithful who endlessly come and go’ (‘ceux restés fidèles qui inlassablement vont et viennent’); Come and Go is the title of a dramaticule written in 1965, in which three women, Flo, Vi and Ru, come and go, changing places on a bench.

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Very Swiftian is the notation, ‘and of course with so little effect...’ Does a nostalgia for a purer, more convincing religion haunt the text as it does Swift? Note the deadpan tonality of the evocation of the Golden Rule: ‘It is enjoined by a certain ethics not to do unto others what coming from them might cause offence’ (par. 14).

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Intertextual play between the French and English versions

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Beckett wrote in two languages, and made the play between his texts and their translations a very complex one, translating himself from French to English and from English to French and sometimes having a hand in translations by third parties (as in the English version of Molloy). Another bilingual author, Vladimir Nabokov, did the same thing: his English rewriting of Kamera Obskura (1932) as Laughter in the Dark (1938) has a complex relationship to a prior English translation Camera Obscura (1936), which Nabokov disliked; his 1968 Russian translation of Lolita (1955) makes it a different book from the English original.

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Though the translation of Le dépeupleur is relatively straightforward, if compared with such radical rewritings as Mercier and Camier (1974), an exuberant transformation of Mercier et Camier (1946), in which we see Beckett returning or regressing to the linguistic high jinks of his More Pricks and Kicks (1934) and Murphy (1938), which bring him into the neighbourhood of Flann O’Brien, a mordant Joycean wit, author of At Swim Two Birds (1939) and The Third Policeman (1940). 

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Despite this sobriety, close study of the two texts nonetheless indicates some characteristic features of Beckett’s practices as a self-translator:

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(1) A first effect to be noted is a sort of parasitic opportunism, whereby the translation smuggles in extra dimensions of significance. Sometimes something is lost, but the general movement of the French to English translations is towards enrichment and complexity. One loss is the weakening of the intertextual echo of Candide: ‘Tout est donc pour le mieux’ becoming ‘So all is for the best’ (par. 11), and the quirky variation on this, ‘tout n’est pas encore tout à fait pour le mieux’ becoming ‘all is not yet quite for the best’ (par. 15); the echo of Voltaire’s actual French words, ‘Tout est pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possibles’, is more audible in the French text. One sentence not easily translatable without loss of effect has been dropped: ‘Dans les feux sombres du plafond le zénith garde encore sa légende’ (par. 15), which poignantly confirms the prediction of paragraph 4: ‘Its fatuous little light will be assuredly the last to leave them always assuming that they are darkward bound’ (‘Sa petite lumière inutile sera bien la dernière à les quitter si tant est que le noir les attend’).

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As an example of enrichment, note for instance a parasitic intertextual effect when ‘ceux qui s’agitent encore’ becomes ‘those still fitfully fevering’ (par. 8), echoing ‘life’s fitful fever’ from Macbeth. A more literal translation would be ‘those stirring still’, but the English makes more explicit the allegorical overtone. ‘Fevering’ then recurs as a rather cryptic keyword: ‘in the midst of the fevering’ (‘au milieu des agités’, par. 10).

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(2) Another feature of Beckettian self-translation is the infiltration of the text with Beckettian key-words, notably the word ‘still’. This is an exercise in intertextuality in which the intertext is Beckett’s own oeuvre. These keywords increase the elegiac tone, as when ‘Le halètement qui l’agite. Il s’arrête de loin en loin tel un souffle sur sa fin. Tous se figent alors’ (par. 1) becomes ‘Its restlessness at long intervals suddenly stilled like panting at the last. Then all go dead still’. The last sentence is repeated on the first page.

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‘Stillness’ translates ‘calme’ (par. 1), ‘immobilité’ (par. 11). ‘Still’ translates ‘encore’ (par. 10, three times ; par. 13); ‘immobiles’ (par. 10). ‘Sans que pour autant la tête bouge’ becomes ‘in heads dead still’; ‘came to a standstill’ translates ‘s’immobilise’; 'font halte’ translates as ‘stand still’ (par. 10). ‘Qu’ils se rapprochent encore’ becomes ‘Let them move on still till they are close enough to touch’ (par. 10). ‘Immobilité de mort’ becomes ‘deathly still’ (par. 13). ‘Se figent’ becomes ‘go still’ (par. 13), ‘figés’ ‘dead still’ (par. 15). ‘A last body… is searching still’ (‘Un dernier cherche encore’); ‘the others dead still’ (‘les autres corps figés’) (par. 15). The end-point of the cylinder-world is alluded to at the beginning (‘the end of their abode’) and discussed further in paragraph 2; it is such that both the temporal and the other sense of ‘still’ are pointers to it: ‘And far from being able to imagine their last state when every body will be still and every eye vacant they will come to it unwitting and be so unawares’ (‘Et loin de pouvoir imaginer leur état ultime ou chaque corps sera fixe et chaque oeil vide ils en viendront là à leur insu et seront tels sans le savoir’).

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Another key-word of Beckett (at the end of The Unnamable and in Company and Ill Seen Ill Said) is ‘on’. It occurs in paragraphs 12 and 15, ‘So on infinitely’ (‘Ainsi de suite à l’infini’). Other Beckettian keywords are ‘weary’, ‘alone’, ‘bowed’, ‘end’, but it is not clear if they have attained keyword status in The Lost Ones.

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(3) A third characteristic is the introduction of wordplay, as a kind of grace-note added to the original. ‘Cette rémission ne dure jamais plus qu’une seconde’ becomes ‘This remission never lasts for more than a little less than a second’ (par. 3). The wordplay sometimes makes it feel as if the language is tumbling over itself, in a clowning failure to say what it means. Translation becomes an opportunity to show Beckett’s art of failure.

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Repetition of the same word frequently marks the English text where the French has no such repetition, as in ‘for some time and more precisely the highly variable time it takes…’ (par. 12); ‘the obligation once in the queue of its choice to queue on to the end’ (par. 12); ‘if it does not please it is only by going right that a more pleasing can be found’ (par. 12); in ‘stranger still at such times all the questing eyes that suddenly go still’ (par. 13) we have this effect along with punning on a keyword.

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French wordplay, as in ‘faire l’infaisable amour’ becomes slightly stronger in English, ‘making unmakable love’ (par. 11). ‘The quidam then quits his post’ (‘Le quidam quitte alors son poste’, par. 2) is stranger in English than in French.

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(4) The allegorical and apocalyptic aspects of the narrative are enhanced when phrases such as ‘Tout va peut-être finir’ are translated in a slightly more solemn manner, ‘It is perhaps the end of their abode’ (‘Leur séjour va peut-être finir’), ‘It is perhaps the end of all’ (‘Tout va peut-être finir’, par. 1). The translation reaches for a more idiomatic expression, but with a quirkiness that is connected with the constraints of the situation of the translator. In general, idioms are oddly obtruded in the course of translation; thus ‘juge préférable de changer de queue’ becomes ‘feel like a little change of queue’ (par. 12), which is an unidiomatic use of a common idiom (‘feel like a change of air’ would be an idiomatic use).

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It was said of Salman Rushdie that he was the only writer who could use the words ‘rutputty’ and ‘lassitudinous’ in the same sentence, both with equal necessity. In Beckett we observe similar conjunctions, but with what appears a deliberate failure of necessity, as in the colloquial ‘slap’ and the strained, unidiomatic ‘untenable’ in the following sentence: ‘For if for the sake of the shortcut it were permitted to carry the ladder slap through the press or skirting the wall at will in either direction life in the cylinder would soon become untenable’ (‘Car s’il était permis au nom du chemin le plus court de porter l’échelle au travers de la cohue ou en suivant le mur dans les deux sens indifféremment la vie du cylindre deviendrait vite impossible’, par. 7). Note how ‘cohue’ becomes the keyword ‘press’.

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‘Woe the body that rashly enters here to be compelled finally to crawl back backwards as best it can the way it came’; ‘Malheur au corps qui s’y aventure à la legère et doit au bout d’un long effort rebrousser chemin comme il peut en rampant à reculons’ (par. 1). ‘Woe the body’ is an elliptic idiom, and ‘to be compelled’ for ‘et doit’ is a less paratactic phrase that demands a slight effort of interpretation, a choice between ‘in order to be compelled’ and ‘only to be compelled’. ‘Back backwards’ is a droll verbal effect which places the movements of the bodies in a more comic light. The English in this sentence has a humour not in the French.

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(5) Gallicisms like ‘fluctuant’ for ‘fluctuante’ or ‘comportment’ for ‘comportement’ (par. 4) abound in the English text and give it a tangy flavour. Sometimes the text exhibits a failure to find the proper English idiom, providing instead a chunky Gallicism. Consider the following Swiftian parody of theological quarrels and the decline of religious belief: ‘Thus by insensible degrees the way out transfers from the tunnel to the ceiling prior to never having been. So much for a first aperçu of this credence so singular in itself and by reason of the loyalty it inspires in the hearts of so many possessed’; ‘Ainsi insensiblement l’issue se déplace du tunnel au plafond avant de n’avoir jamais existé. Voilà un premier aperçu de cette croyance en elle-même si étrange et par la fidélité qu’elle inspire à tant de coeurs possédés’ (par. 4). ‘Aperçu of this credence’ is a quaintly Gallican phrase that further diminishes the Lilliputian theology of ‘this little people of searchers’ (par. 15), as does ‘so much for’ translating ‘voilà’. The latter recurs at the end of paragraph 6 again in the last sentence of the entire text: ‘So much roughly speaking for the last state of the cylinder’ where the placing of ‘roughly speaking’ is quirky; the French is ‘voilà en gros’. The fact that the text has no punctuation apart from periods has a great effect in making the English text laconic and quirky, as here. Among other minor instance, ‘soon or late’ unidiomatically translates ‘tôt ou tard’ (par. 2, par. 10), yet it has a solemn tone that the more normal ‘sooner or later’ would lack, and is more memorable as a recurrent motif.

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(6) Concentration and concreteness are effects easier attained in English than in French, and generally mark Beckett’s translations into English. For instance, ‘bolt upright’ has more physical force than ‘debout’ (par. 1, par. 5).

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The Dantesque observation, ‘L’identification est rendue difficile par la presse et par l’obscurité’ (par. 2) is tauter in English, ‘The gloom and press make recognition difficult’; compare paragraph 10, ‘Press and gloom make recognition difficult’, translating ‘La presse et l’obscurité rendent difficile l’identification’. ‘Gloom’ replaces French abstraction with Anglo-Saxon vividness – though this sense of ‘gloom’ is somewhat archaic or poetic (cf. Newman’s ‘amid th’encircling gloom’), and ‘press’ is rather a Gallicism. ‘Gloom’ translates ‘pénombre’ in par. 11.

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‘Recognition’ for ‘identification’ brings out the state of mutual recognition of lost ones. The phrase ‘wrung from Dante one of his rare wan smiles’ (‘arracha à Dante un de ses rares pales sourires’) has alliteration (wrung, rare) and visual alliteration (wrung, wan) and its eight monosyllabic words again give tautness. The genius of English for concreteness and brevity carries a stage further the attainment of these effects in French, where it was limited by the polysyllabic and abstract nature of the Latinate vocabulary. Compare ‘fast but not so fast that the pulse is no longer felt’ and ‘à une vitesse qui pour être élevée ne dépasse jamais celle qui rendrait la pulsation imperceptible’ (par. 11) – thirteen syllables in English, thirty-four in French! Why did he not write in French: ‘vite mais pas si vite que la pulsation n’est plus perçue’? The style of the French sets its own stately pace. In the same sentence, ‘vibre de façon régulière et continue’ becomes ‘throbs with constant unchanging beat’, which eliminates the abstract ‘façon’ and gives physical force to the adjectives. The opening page spoke of the ‘more measured beat’ of the oscillating temperature (for ‘une respiration plus lente’).

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(7) Compression often creates opacity as in: ‘Sucklings who having no longer to suck huddle at gaze [a heraldic terrm] in the lap or sprawled on the ground in precocious postures’, translating: ‘Bébés à la mamelle qui n’ayant plus à téter cherchent des yeux depuis le giron ou à croupetons par terre dans des poses précoces’ (par. 10). The elliptical character of Beckett’s writing is increased in English, applying a steady pressure on the reader, a demand for interpretative alertness. As Brian T. Fitch notes, the English version tends to humanize the characters and gives the narrator a more insistent presence, ‘unobtrusive to be sure and intermittent in manifesting itself in a tangible linguistic form, but unmistakably there in so many turns of phrase’ (Beckett and Babel, University of Toronto Press, 1988, 117).

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Listing these effects indicates that translation for Beckett is not a matter of siphoning sense from one linguistic milieu to another but creating a verbal artefact that carries marks of its translational status, deliberate clumsinesses, which invite us to study the translation as a textual performance. As Leslie Hill observes, the role of translation ‘is not to formulate ideas, but more nearly to dissolve them, to use them as pretexts for the silent motion of language itself’ (50).

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The constructed imaginary space of the cylinder is a shape that the language labours to evoke in both versions. This effort at statement is made to seem a difficult and delicate matter, as if the narrator were not fully in control of his scenario, and the difficulty thickens in the English version. ‘He has therefore merely to watch at the mouth of his niche for a ladder to present itself and immediately start down quite easy in his mind knowing full well that whoever below is on the point of mounting if not already on his way up will give way in his favour’ (par. 6). This is clear, despite the absence of punctuation, yet oddly convoluted and angular. There is a redundancy in ‘quite easy in his mind knowing full well’ and an economy in the placing of ‘below’ that suggest translation. Looking at the French we find that it reads more normally, and less grippingly: ‘Il n’a donc qu’à guetter à la bouche de sa niche qu’une échelle vienne se présenter pour l’emprunter en toute quiétude et avec l’assurance que celui en bas sur le point voire en train de monter lui cédera le pas’. The denormalization of the text through passing it through the filter of translation lends a certain uncanniness to Beckett’s tone in English, a tangentiality of his speech to that of which it speaks.

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Tragic Qualities in Beckett

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Beckett’s works wrestle with severe psychological problems. His works can be seen as self-therapies, or as efforts to wrest universal ciphers of the human condition from the material of his suffering. However, there is a danger of facile projection of ‘everyman’ typologies into the nightmare scenarios he imagines, and a too free use of intertextuality can court this danger. The accumulation of intertextual resonances in Endgame is perhaps less an aid to universality than an obsessive collecting-technique. The critics’ fun in unearthing such allusions militates against the reception of his texts as having tragic depth.

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Is Beckett in fact a tragic author? Does he produce the tragic fear and pity that bring a purified apprehension of the terrors of the human condition, the katharsis of which Aristotle speaks? Tragedy ‘through pity (eleos) and fear (phobos) achieves a purgation (katharsis) of emotions (pathêmatôn) of this sort’ (Poetics 49b). Lessing sees this tragic effect as realizing the moralischer Endzweck, the moral goal of tragedy (Hamburgische Dramaturgie, no. 77). He insists that the phobos cannot be mere Schrecken but must be a Furcht based on insight into the human significance of the tragic action.

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Classicists recently have been busy deflating the Aristotelian dictum that has played so great a role in theories about the essence of the tragic. Roselyne Dupont-Roc and Jean Lallot in their edition of the Poetics (Editions du Seuil, 1980) translate phobos as frayeur or terreur. The phrase ‘pity and terror’ was merely a cliché, not at all a special insight. Aristotle is merely reporting on the aesthetic effect whereby tragedy induces a frisson which it at the same time robs of its painfulness and transforms into a pleasure. Lessing, as Nikolaus Müller-Schöll insisted at the international colloquium on Corneille et le théâtre classique (Sophia University, November 2006), projects onto Aristotle an eighteenth-century ideology of universal human nature, and his own didactic project of using theatre to create a more just and peaceful civilization. Indeed there is no essence of the tragic, Christian Biet added, and it is futile to pursue the old game of judging that, say, Corneille replaces tragedy with reflective tragi-comedies whereas Racine, in his stricter adherence to Aristotelian precepts as then understood did attain something like the tragic effect that Aristotle would have admired in Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.

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Against all this, I would object that in context the Aristotelian fear and pity concern the unfolding of a plot; they do not arise only at the climaxes but they suffuse the entire action followed with grave attention by the spectators – ‘Anteil am integralen Ganzen der Aktion’, Walter Benjamin calls it, reminding us also of the ‘cultic character of Greek theater’ and linking katharsis with the religious ‘purification through the Mysteries’ (Ges. Schriften I, 241). The fear aroused is of a moral order – the matricide of Orestes, for instance, strikes fear in the soul; its physical gruesomeness is of little account, and physical violence is always kept offstage to keep the focus on the moral terror. The pity, likewise, is not a passing emotion but a reflective pity, laced with insight, something like Wilfred Owen’s ‘the pity war distilled’.

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Lessing speaks of humanity in the eighteenth-century style, but this does not disqualify all talk of ‘the human condition’ into which the tragic experience gives a special kind of insight. Lessing’s critique of Corneille is not at the service of an anti-tragic didactic conception of theatre, but seeks precisely to save the tragic effect from the diluting and rationalizing interpretation given in Corneille’s Trois Discours sur le poème dramatique (which as Michael Desprez showed is indebted to Italian scholars who had developed a flexible understanding of Aristotle). In his own plays, such as Emilia Galotti, he attained a measure of tragic intensity, not to be found in French theatre after Racine, and the tragic pitch would be attained again in Schiller, Goethe (Faust I), Kleist, Hölderlin (Empedokles and the Sophocles translations). This suggests that the Germans did have a sensitive grasp of the power of Greek tragedy, and that in their rejection of rule-bound classicism they were in fact close to the phenomenon to which Aristotle’s empirical notes were pointing (just as Shakespeare was, though writing in the Senecan tradition of bloody spectacle). The aesthetic effect of tragic fear and pity is one of the most easily recognizable and locatable aesthetic phenomena – it is what we encounter in Oedipus, Lear, Macbeth, Phèdre – and its ‘purgative’ or tonic aspect is rather clearly connected with insight into the human condition. The nominalism that invokes the historical pluralism of ideologies and genres to dispute the reality of the tragic effect spells the loss of an important category in discussion of authors such as Corneille, Racine and Beckett.

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Beckett admired Racine’s Bérénice, an elegiac rather than tragic play, a play of suspended action, in which ‘nothing happens’. His own plays do not gather toward the climax of a tragic plot, but dwell in a state that certainly induces fear and pity – the state of Winnie in Happy Days for example. The relation of Beckett’s art to tragedy is tangential rather than direct. The tragedy has already happened and the characters find themselves in a posthumous penumbra; or the tragedy is unable to happen and the characters are condemned to a steady decay rather than a cathartic catastrophe. Texts like The Lost Ones, by their ironic and distancing style, would seem to freeze the intense pathêmata that the represented situation should produce (and that Dante’s depictions of Hell produce). However, I have heard of people bursting into tears on reading what look like very dry paragraphs of Beckettian prose. Beckett has in any case the undoubted ability to create emotions of depression. Does his style ease the pain of these emotions and transform it into a bitter-sweet pleasure? He also forces the reader to undergo periods of painful boredom – but does the irony or comedy of such passages change that also into aesthetic pleasure?

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Perhaps the answer is, ‘Often, but not always’ – the ‘failures’ that Beckett’s art courts are often paradoxical successes, he ‘fails better’, but sometimes they are merely failures. In the present case, much turns on one’s response to the figure described as ‘the north’ in paragraph 14 and the final encounter of the last searcher with that figure in paragraph 15. My own feeling is that the evocation of the futile searching throughout the text has a deep elegiac impact, but that the effort to provide these minor highlights rather falls flat, marking the impossibility of raising the mournful vision to a more dramatic or tragic level. Indeed, later Beckett might be seen as in recession from the tragic pitch attained in such works as Happy Days and as absorbed in a mellower musing on ends and the impossibility of ending. He had trouble completing The Lost Ones and the added paragraph, an exercise in apocalyptic carried over from Endgame, may indicate that he still clung to a certain ideal of closure, unprepared to accept the full implication of the ‘residual’ character of his writing. A better ending would have been to advance to fuller insight into the aporetic character of the narration, as happens in Company.

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Joseph S. O’Leary (paper for international conference, ‘Borderless Beckett’, Waseda University, Tokyo, September 29, 2006 (English Literature and Language 43, 2006)

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He had trouble completing The Lost Ones and the added paragraph, an exercise in apocalyptic carried over from Endgame, may indicate that he still clung to a certain ideal of closure, unprepared to accept the full implication of the ‘residual’ character of his writing.