The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Samuel Beckett · a novel in two parts · written in French and published by Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1951 · scored on the French original as the first novel of the trilogy, on its own, read from knowledge; the English of 1955, made by Patrick Bowles in collaboration with the author, quoted beneath the French; no text in hand
Mode
Comic novel of abjection; picaresque and detective story told as two first-person reports
Mythos
The quest and the descent into the forest; the return to the mother; the hunter who becomes his quarry; a master never seen and his messenger; father and son on the road
Phase
Two journeys of uncertain date and order, each told afterwards by the man who made it, the second report ending on the sentences that began it
Presentation
Fiction; two parts of about equal length, the first in two paragraphs, the second of them unbroken for some eighty pages, the second part in ordinary paragraphs; both narrators write in the first person and to order
Register
From Molloy’s plain, self-cancelling monologue, clipped and endless by turns, to Moran’s precise, pious, self-satisfied report, which loosens as he falls
Scale
Two men, a mother, a son, a forest, a house and the road between
Governing Proposition
Two men write to order. Molloy, in his mother’s room, fills pages for a man who comes each week to take them, telling of a journey to find his mother through encounters he can no longer vouch for; Moran, a Catholic householder and an agent, reports to a master he has never seen on his mission to find Molloy, and is stripped on the road to the condition of the man he hunts. The wager of the novel is that a self is a story told under orders whose source it cannot see, that the teller finds at the end he is the man he was sent to find, and that only two halves set side by side and never joined can show it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Je suis dans la chambre de ma mère. C’est moi qui y vis maintenant.”
“I am in my mother’s room. It’s I who live there now.” The novel opens on the end of a search. The son who set out to find his mother is in her room and lives there in her place, and the second sentence puts its weight on the pronoun: it is he, and it is now. Beckett wrote the book in French, and Éditions de Minuit published it in Paris in 1951. The English given here beneath the French is the version of 1955, made by Patrick Bowles in collaboration with the author.
Molloy writes to order. A man comes each week, takes away the pages, and brings back the last week’s with marks on them; who sends him, Molloy does not say. The short first paragraph of the part tells this much, and then the second paragraph begins and does not stop. It runs unbroken to the end of the part, some eighty pages in the standard editions, without a break for rest. In it a stone and a killing receive the same sentence, and nothing is set above anything else: the form is the mind that writes it, a mind with no rest and no hierarchy.
The book has two parts of roughly equal length, set side by side with nothing to join them. The second is the report of another man, Moran, who also writes to order, for a master he has never seen, and whose report is laid out in ordinary paragraphs. Nothing in the novel says how the two belong together, or which comes first in time. Each man writes in the first person, each tells of a journey, and each knows less at the end of his telling than at its start. Whatever binds them has to be found by laying one over the other.
Movement II
The long paragraph opens on a height. From a rock, at evening, Molloy watches two men on the road, whom he calls A and C. It is a pastoral of country and dusk, among the most beautiful passages in Beckett’s prose, and the narrator undoes it as he makes it, doubting what he saw while he is still describing it. The book’s method is there in its first long page: the thing is given and then taken back, and the giving and the taking are equally exact.
Then come the encounters, one after another, in the manner of the picaresque. A policeman stops him, and there is the matter of his papers, timed like a farce. He stays with a woman called Lousse and her dog, longer than the episode needs. He remembers a woman called Ruth, or Edith, and cannot say whether she was a woman. Any of these could be moved, and some could go: they are the stations of a road more than the parts of a machine, and the book’s necessity does not lie in their order.
Through all of it the one fixed point is his mother. He is going to find her. He cannot say whether he has a son; he cannot say, later, whether he killed the charcoal-burner. The order of things in his account is uncertain, the dates and seasons slide, and names will not stay put. None of this is a slip: the man telling it can vouch for nothing, and the book keeps to that law for the whole of his part. What he can vouch for is the first thing he said, that he is in his mother’s room, in her place.
Movement III
Between the encounters lie the systems, and the systems are the matter. Molloy has sixteen sucking stones and four pockets, and he wants the stones to circulate, so that each is sucked in its turn. He works the problem through, permutation by permutation, at length, until the last case is settled. It is the comic sublime: a combinatorial frenzy pursued to the end by a man who owns almost nothing, and the arithmetic is built and carried through, not gestured at.
There are other systems. He counts his farts and reduces the count to an hourly average. He speaks to his mother by knocks on her skull. These are not ornaments on a story. They are the whole equipment of the mind that tells it, and the novel’s knowledge is that this mind has nothing else: only its systems, and the exactness with which it keeps them. The comedy and the desolation are one fact, seen at once.
The body fails as the systems multiply. By the end of the part Molloy is crawling through the forest, and the crawl carries dread and a strange release together. He comes out at its edge into a ditch, and from the ditch he has a last sight of the plain. The long paragraph ends there, with the man in the ditch, and the next page belongs to someone else. Between the ditch and the room there is nothing the book will vouch for.
Movement IV
“Il est minuit. La pluie fouette les vitres.”
“It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows.” The second part opens in another voice and another kind of prose. Moran writes a report, in ordinary paragraphs and orderly reasoning, for Youdi, his employer, whom he has never seen; Youdi’s orders reach him through a messenger, Gaber. Moran is precise, pious and pleased with himself, and his sentences show it. After the unbroken paragraph of the first part, the page itself looks like order.
The report begins with a Sunday. Moran has beer with the priest; there is an omelette; his son Jacques has his lessons; there is an enema. Moran keeps hens and bees, and keeps his faith. Into this Sunday comes Gaber with an order from Youdi: Moran is to find Molloy. The scene is the order before the fall, and every detail of it, from the omelette to the enema, is set down with the satisfied exactness that the rest of the report will lose.
Moran sets out with his son. The two on the road carry two old patterns at once: the father who leads his son toward a sacrifice, and the knight with his squire, Quixote and Sancho. They carry a third, from the detective story, since Moran is an agent on a case. Over all of it stands a theology in parody, Youdi who orders and Gaber who carries the word, with the plain echoes of a God and his angel, and Moran’s questions on doctrine. The frame is satire, a little apart in key from the rest of the book, and it gives the agent’s obedience a heaven to answer to.
Movement V
The mission strips him. Moran’s body fails on the road, as Molloy’s did. His son leaves him and takes the bicycle, and with the son’s flight the line of father and son ends. Moran goes on alone, crippled, a vagrant, and as he goes his prose loosens: the neat paragraphs and the orderly reasoning decay as he decays. By the end he speaks like Molloy. The hunter has become the quarry, the agent sent to find a man has become the man, and the book never says so; it sets the two voices side by side and leaves the likeness to be heard.
He returns through the seasons to his house, and finds it abandoned. The return is one of the book’s heights, and it is reached by subtraction: the householder of the Sunday has nothing left of his household. He has studied the dance of his bees, and he refuses to reduce it to a meaning. It stays a dance, the one system in the book that is allowed to keep its sense to itself, and the man who once ordered everything leaves it unordered.
Then the report closes on the sentences that opened it, and denies them: “Il est minuit. La pluie fouette les vitres.” … “Il n’était pas minuit. Il ne pleuvait pas.”
“It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows.” … “It was not midnight. It was not raining.” The close turns the whole report into fiction at the moment it ends: what was told was made. Molloy went to find his mother and is in her place; Moran went to find Molloy and has become him. Two men under orders, each finding at the end that he is the one he was sent to find, and no sentence anywhere that says it.
Act III · The Twelve
The halves need each other. Take away Moran and Molloy’s monologue is a voice without a measure; take away Molloy and Moran’s decline has nothing to decline toward. Inside each half the test is harder. The first part is picaresque in build, a run of encounters, the two walkers seen at evening, the policeman and the papers, Lousse and her dog, Ruth or Edith, the charcoal-burner, the crawl through the forest, and several could go without breaking the line. What resists subtraction is that the digressions are the matter: the sixteen sucking stones sent round four pockets, the count of farts reduced to an hourly average, the mother addressed by knocks on her skull are not ornaments on a story but the whole equipment of the mind that tells it. Held below the top because the Lousse interlude and parts of Moran’s journey run longer than their work.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a self is a story told under orders whose source it cannot see, and when the body and the order fail, the teller finds he is the man he was sent to find. Moran begins as the model of a Catholic householder, with his Sunday, his son’s lessons, his hens and bees and his obedience to Youdi; the mission strips him to a crippled vagrant who speaks like Molloy. Molloy cannot say whether his son exists, whether Ruth was a woman, whether he killed the charcoal-burner; his one fixed point is his mother, whom he goes to find and finds he has replaced. The close, denying the first sentence it repeats, discloses that report is invention. A meaning, not a mood; held off the top because the abjection in which it is rendered sometimes thickens toward mood.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Elevation comes, but by deflation more than by height. The opening of the long paragraph, two men on the road at evening watched from a rock, is among the most beautiful passages in Beckett’s prose, a pastoral of country and dusk that the narrator undoes as he makes it. The sucking stones are the comic sublime, a combinatorial frenzy pursued to the last permutation. The crawl through the forest and the last sight of the plain from the ditch carry dread and a strange release. In the second part the heights are Moran’s study of the dance of his bees, which he refuses to reduce to meaning, and his return through the seasons to a house abandoned. What holds the axis here is frequency: long stretches are flat by design, comedy is the usual register, and the book rises less often than the novels it stands among.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Myth built, not evoked: the quest, the descent into the forest, the return to the mother and the hunter who becomes his quarry are not atmosphere but the plot. Over Moran stands a theology in parody, Youdi who orders and Gaber who carries the word, with the plain echoes of a God and his angel; Moran’s report is written for a master never seen, as Molloy’s pages go to a man who brings back the last week’s with marks on them. Moran and his son Jacques on the road carry the pattern of the sacrifice and of Quixote and Sancho at once, and the son’s flight with the bicycle ends the line. The doubling of Moran and Molloy is the book’s one myth, and the book is built on it. Held a step down because the archetypes are partly ironised into allusion, and the irony costs them some depth.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The inheritance is Joyce above all, with Proust, Kafka, Dante, Descartes and Geulincx, the picaresque and Cervantes, and the detective story in Moran’s mission. The turn is from Joyce’s art of adding to an art of taking away: impoverishment as method, a narrator who knows less with each page, a voice that cancels as it states, a second half that annuls its own first sentence. The change of language was part of the turn. The stake was real: a writer past forty with little reputation, a manuscript turned down by publishers until Éditions de Minuit took it, in a language not his own. Held below the top because the turn was prepared in the French stories of 1946 and in Watt, and because L’Innommable takes it further, so that the swerve is the trilogy’s as much as this book’s. The doubled structure and the denial at the close are this book’s own.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. The two halves are set side by side and never joined: the doubling is found only by laying Moran over Molloy, and the book knows its central matter only through that act. Molloy’s single unbroken paragraph is the form of a mind with no rest and no hierarchy, where a stone and a killing receive the same sentence. Moran’s report begins in neat paragraphs and orderly reasoning and decays as he decays, so that the form of his half enacts his loss of form. The last lines, repeating the first and denying them, turn the whole report into fiction at the moment it closes. Tell it in the third person, or in one sequence with the identity of the two made plain, and nothing is left but a story about tramps. Held a step off the top because the episodes of the first part could be reordered with less loss than the frame suggests.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: seventy-five years of reading have not settled it. The first response came at once, Georges Bataille’s essay on Molloy’s silence in Critique, and the readings since have not converged: theological, from Youdi and Gaber and Moran’s questions on doctrine; philosophical, from Descartes and Geulincx, the body a machine the mind rides like a bicycle; psychoanalytic, from the mother’s room and the return to the womb; political and historical, a manhunt by the agent of an unseen organisation, written by a man who had served in the Resistance and hidden in the south; and bilingual, laying the French against the English. The core questions stay open: whether Moran becomes Molloy, which half comes first in time, who Molloy’s son is, whether either report is true. The formal depth yields as much as the semantic. Held off the very top beside the oldest works, which have outlasted more kinds of reading.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The field is the novel in French and in English of the mid twentieth century. The force is a reorganisation of what a narrative voice can be: a teller who does not know, who invents and annuls, whose authority is the subject of the novel; with it the book closes the road that ran from realism through Joyce. What holds the axis here is that the reach runs through the trilogy and through Beckett’s name, much of it carried by Godot and by L’Innommable, so this book’s share is an estimate; and the voice it opened is now widely imitated as a manner without its stake. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Minuit list built around it, and the new novel that followed, Robbe-Grillet, Pinget, Simon and Sarraute, took Beckett as forerunner; Bernhard’s monologue novels, Coetzee, who wrote his doctoral thesis on Beckett’s prose, Auster, Kelman and Banville descend from the trilogy.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over seventy-five years. What makes the work survives whole: an authorial text, from the French first edition of 1951, without loss or later hands, and an English made with the author in 1955, which strengthens the text’s survival rather than charging it. It has been in print without a break in French since 1951 and in English since 1955, translated widely, taught in universities across languages, and read beyond them. Its surface is not fixed to its moment: there is no period dress, no topical satire, nothing that requires 1950 to be understood. It is charged on presence in one respect: its readers are fewer than the readers of Godot or of the most-read novels of its century, and it is read largely by serious readers and in the academy.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged on the French, with the English made with the author beside it. The French is written by a foreigner in absolute command of its cadence: a plain diction pressed into sentences that swing between the clipped and the endless, with self-correction as a rhythm of thought. The comic timing is exact, from the policeman to the arithmetic of the stones, which is built as a set of permutations and carried through. Moran’s prose is a pastiche of a precise, pious, self-satisfied voice, held for a hundred pages while it slowly loosens: a second instrument mastered as fully as the first. The two openings, and a paragraph that keeps its reader for eighty pages without a rest, are technical feats. Held below the highest marks because the long paragraph’s evenness at times slackens into repetition that is meant but not always earned.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Moran’s Sunday at the start of his report, beer with the priest, the omelette, the boy’s lessons and an enema, and Molloy in the ditch at the edge of the forest. They obey one law: everything decays, and every telling is made under orders and undone by the teller; Moran’s order slides by stages into Molloy’s condition. The range is wide, from flatulence to doctrine, from slapstick to dread, and one voice of exactitude about the absurd governs all of it. The small inconsistencies, of dates, seasons, names and Molloy’s uncertain son, are the law at work, not breaches of it: the narrators’ unreliability is the physics. Held below the top because the theological frame of Youdi and Gaber sits a little apart, in a key of satire the rest does not share.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The orders are fewer than in the long novels and deliberately reduced, but more are held than the book’s austerity suggests. Consciousness is the ground; the body, in its failure, is a second order. The family: the mother in the first part, father and son in the second. The sacred, in Moran’s faith, his questions on doctrine and the parody of Youdi and Gaber. The state and its law: the policeman and the papers, the agency with its agents and messengers. Labour, in Moran’s employment as an agent. The natural order: the forest, the sea and the shore, the seasons, the bees. Love and sex, in Ruth and Lousse. All are integrated around the dissolving self. What holds the axis here is what is thin: history is absent from the page, society is seen only at its edges, and every order is held thinly by design. A small world, achieved fully.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.3, then The Swerve, The Living Form and The Bottomless Well at 9.2. Two instruments mastered in a language not the author’s own, an unbroken monologue that holds for eighty pages and a pious report that loosens as its writer falls; a turn from Joyce’s art of adding to an art of taking away; two halves set side by side and never joined, whose doubling is found only by laying one over the other; and seventy-five years of reading, theological, philosophical, psychoanalytic and political, that have not settled whether Moran becomes Molloy.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.0, held by what is thin: history is absent from the page, society is seen only at its edges, and every order the book holds, from the family and the sacred to the state’s agency and the natural order, is held thinly by design. Next above it, The Sublime at 8.4: heights reached by deflation and spaced across long stretches flat by design. Then The Inevitable at 8.6, where the Lousse interlude and parts of Moran’s journey run longer than their work.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.3, The Living Form at 9.2, The Inner Law at 9.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Swerve at 9.2, Pressure on Tradition at 9.0, The Imperishable at 9.0, The Unconcealment at 8.9 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, the last by three tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below 8.4, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.0. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, at 8.9.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, a novel in two parts written in French and published by Éditions de Minuit, Paris, in 1951. It is scored on the French original, as the first novel of the trilogy and on its own; Malone meurt and L’Innommable are its context, not the work. The English is Molloy (1955), translated by Patrick Bowles in collaboration with the author. It serves two purposes: it is the English quoted on this page beneath the French, and it is the version of the book this reading knows across its whole length. It was chosen because it is the authorised English, made with Beckett and so in part his own, though not his alone as the English of the two later novels is. Every axis is judged on the French, and nothing in the English is charged to the work. The French is known here in its opening, its close and many phrases, less fully across its length; its cadence is in part beyond this reading, and that limit is neither credited nor charged. No text was in hand, nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Words are quoted only where they are certain, French above English: the opening of the first part, and the first and last lines of the second. Everything else is paraphrased. Facts that could not be verified, among them the dates of composition, the word count, the date of Bataille’s essay, the wording of Beckett’s reported reason for writing in French, and the state of Moran’s hens and bees on his return, are not given.