The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Samuel Beckett · a novel in one voice, without chapters or parts · written in French as L’Innommable and published by Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1953 · scored on the French original as the third novel of the trilogy, on its own, read from knowledge; Beckett’s own English of 1958 quoted, beneath the French where both are certain; no text in hand
Mode
Comic and metaphysical novel of one voice; monologue as penance
Mythos
A limbo with masters; a penance whose terms are withheld; the self not yet born; a labour in language that cannot be finished
Phase
No time the voice will vouch for: an indefinite present of speaking, from three opening questions to a last sentence that goes on
Presentation
Fiction; one first-person voice, no chapters or parts; a run of short paragraphs, then one paragraph to the end, closing on a sentence many pages long
Register
From farce and polemic against the masters to grief and theology, in one plain voice that corrects itself as it goes
Scale
One voice, a few surrogates, a rotunda, a jar, and the masters over all
Governing Proposition
A voice speaks from a place it cannot name, under orders from masters it cannot see, to finish a task it has not been told, after which it may be silent. It tries on surrogates, the heroes of earlier books, a cripple called Mahood in two stories and a being not yet born called Worm, and disowns each in turn. The wager of the novel is that the one who speaks is not found in anything he says, that “I” is a position in language filled with words that others put there, and that only one paragraph that cannot stop, closing on a sentence that cannot either, can show it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Where now? Who now? When now?” The book opens on three questions and no answer. The words are Beckett’s English; the work is his French. L’Innommable was written in French and published by Éditions de Minuit, Paris, in 1953, the third of the novels that began with Molloy and Malone meurt. The Unnamable followed from Grove Press, New York, in 1958, and Beckett made it alone, where Molloy had been made into English with Patrick Bowles. The questions ask for a place, a person and a time, the three things a novel ordinarily supplies first, and the book will supply none of them.
There is one voice, in the first person, from the first line to the last. There are no chapters and no parts, and no setting beyond what the voice proposes and then withdraws. The book opens with a run of short paragraphs, as though it might go on in the ordinary way. Within its first pages it settles into a single paragraph, and that paragraph runs to the end. The page becomes the condition it describes: a speech that cannot pause, because to pause would be to have found somewhere to stand.
A few lines after the questions, the voice states its whole case in four words: “I, say I. Unbelieving.” The pronoun is required, since speech needs a subject, and it is not believed, since nothing the speaker says of himself will turn out to be his. It is the thinking subject of Descartes with the certainty taken away. Something still thinks, and goes on thinking, but cannot find the one who thinks. The rest of the book works those four words out by every means the voice can find, and records the failure of every means.
Movement II
The voice begins by clearing the room. One like Malone passes it at intervals, or it supposes he does. The heroes of the earlier books are named and sent away: “All these Murphys, Molloys and Malones do not fool me.” They were surrogates, stories told so that the teller need not speak of himself. The author’s own creatures are dismissed by name in the book’s early pages, and the dismissal reads without them: it needs only the knowledge that there were such stories, and that they were told in place of the one who told them.
Over the voice stand masters it calls “they”. They have set it a task, a pensum, which it must finish before it may be silent, and it does not know what the task is. They have a college; they give lessons about God, about men, about the light; and the voice suspects that everything it knows, perhaps everything it is, was put into it by them. They are teachers, judges and gods at once, and they never appear. The book is a limbo with masters, and the penance it serves is speech.
Here the disclosure lies. If the words come from others, the one who speaks them is not found in them, and “I” is a place in language that others have filled. The wish to speak and the wish for silence turn out to be one wish: the voice may stop when it has said itself, and it cannot say itself, because whatever it says is theirs. The cycles about the masters come round again in the long middle, sometimes without turning, and the book pays for them there. But the frame they make carries the book, as a sentence carries the one who serves it.
Movement III
The voice tries other surrogates. One is Basil, whom it renames Mahood, and Mahood gives it two stories. In the first he is a traveller with one leg, on crutches, circling back towards a rotunda where his family live. They die inside while he circles. When he arrives he tramples what is left of them. It is told in the voice’s offhand register, and it is terrible and funny in the same clause, a grotesque that the telling neither softens nor remarks on.
In the second story Mahood has no limbs at all. He is a trunk in a jar outside a chophouse near the Paris shambles. The proprietress, Marguerite, covers the jar with a tarpaulin and fixes the menu to it, and there are lanterns about it. Abjection is made civic and almost tender: the jar is a fixture of the street, it advertises the dishes, and someone looks after it. The voice lives in this body for a while, and then disowns it as it disowned the first.
Apart from the speaker’s own tears, these stories are where the book stays particular in the full sense: the crutches, the rotunda, the jar, the menu, the woman who tends it. They hold the family, grotesquely, and the city and its trade. They are where the voice comes nearest to a world, and the world they give is debris: a household destroyed, a body reduced, a street seen from a jar. Then the voice puts Mahood away as it put away the earlier heroes, because he too was a story told in place of the one who tells it.
Movement IV
The voice asks how it is to proceed, and answers with a question: “By aporia pure and simple?” The method is the sentence. It makes a claim and withdraws it, affirms and denies, corrects itself and corrects the correction. Recast as an essay, the book would assert that the self cannot be found; as it stands, it performs the search and the failure clause by clause, so that the failure is undergone rather than reported. The joke is often in the correction, left unremarked, and so is the grief.
After Mahood comes Worm, the one not yet born. Worm has no voice, no story and no place. He is built as the self that never entered life, beneath every story told about it, and he cannot even serve as a surrogate, since there is nothing in him to inhabit. Whether Worm comes before Mahood or lies beneath him the book does not settle. Stretches of the Worm section restate the impasse rather than deepen it, and the monotony that is the book’s medium is here also its cost.
Near the end the voice imagines itself as the partition between the inside and the outside, belonging to neither. It is the book’s image of itself, and one of its heights. Everything the voice has tried, the earlier heroes, Mahood twice, Worm, has stood on one side or the other: a story told outward, or a self looked for within. What speaks is the partition, and a partition has no story of its own. The search that the book has been making is shown, at this point, to have had nowhere to arrive.
Movement V
The last stretch of the book is one sentence, many pages long, joined by commas and stopped only at the last word. It quickens as it goes. The voice, still under orders and still unable to say itself, comes to its close without having earned an ending, and the form does what the words say: there is no full stop until there is nothing left to stop. Then: “il faut continuer, je ne peux pas continuer, je vais continuer”
“you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on”.
Three clauses: an order, a refusal, a resolve. The order is the masters’, the refusal is the voice’s, and the resolve belongs to neither and to both. Whether it is defeat or affirmation the book does not say, and the question has not been settled since. The clause has passed far beyond the book’s readers as a common phrase for endurance, and it carries into ordinary speech the structure of the whole: a labour that cannot be finished and cannot be put down.
Maurice Blanchot answered the book in the year it appeared, and took two of its opening questions for the title of his essay. Its publisher was the house of Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute, and it stood beside the new novel without being of it; J. M. Coetzee wrote his doctorate on Beckett’s English fiction, and Berio set passages of it in Sinfonia. It is a terminus as much as a source. Beckett had come to it through Molloy and Malone meurt, taking away a little more each time, and here the taking away is complete: what remains when everything but a voice is gone, and a voice that will not stop.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and the book invites it openly: its matter is a voice that cannot stop, so it may be asked why it does not stop sooner. The answer is the argument. The voice is under orders to speak until it has said itself, and it cannot; an ending reached because enough had been said would refute the book. The argument sets the length, and the length is modest. Each part takes away one more surrogate: the opening questions and hypotheses, the earlier heroes, Mahood twice, Worm, the last sentence. What gives way is the long middle, where cycles about the masters and the pensum come round without turning and the Worm section restates an impasse rather than deepening it: perhaps a tenth of the book is allowed rather than required.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. The one who speaks is not found in anything he says. “I” is a position in language, filled with words that others put there; the urge to speak and the longing for silence are one urge; and a consciousness can neither catch itself nor stop. The book says it near its opening: “I, say I. Unbelieving.” This is the thinking subject of Descartes with the certainty taken away: what remains still thinks, but cannot find the one who thinks, and suspects its thoughts are lessons set by others, with their talk of God, of men, of the light. A meaning, not a mood. Held below the top because the condition disclosed is one consciousness at its limit; its social reach, the subject as made by its teachers, is real but inferred.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The elevation is dreadful and comic at once, and it reaches great height. Mahood circles the rotunda while his family die inside, then tramples what is left of them, a grotesque terrible and funny in the same clause. The trunk in its jar stands under a tarpaulin, with the menu fixed to it and lanterns about it, abjection made civic and almost tender. Near the end the voice imagines itself as the partition between the inside and the outside, belonging to neither. The last sentence quickens over pages into its three clauses, one of the great endings in the novel. Frequency is the charge: the long middle is grey by design, monotony is its medium and its cost, and stretches pass without lift.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Myth built, not evoked. The book is a limbo with masters. Unseen authorities set a penance, the pensum, which the speaker must finish before he may be silent, and he does not know what it is. Their college and their lessons make them teachers, judges and gods at once. Worm, the one not yet born, is built as the self that never entered life, beneath every story told about it. The structure is a Sisyphean labour in language, carrying the book rather than lying on it as allusion, and its last words have become a common phrase for endurance. Held a tenth above the bar by the rubric’s own clause: the particular must stay particular, and this book dissolves its particulars on purpose. Only Mahood on his crutches and in his jar, the proprietress and the speaker’s tears stay particular in full.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance is the novel from Cervantes to Joyce and Proust, with Kafka, Dostoevsky’s underground monologue, Dante’s afterlife, and Descartes and Geulincx in the philosophy behind it. The turn is the largest the novel had then taken: it removes plot, character, setting, time and even the paragraph, and keeps only a voice speaking of why it cannot speak of itself. Where Joyce moved towards totality, this moves towards impoverishment, in a language its author had adopted. The stake was real. Beckett was in his forties and barely published; Murphy had sold little and Watt had no publisher; the trilogy appeared only because Jérôme Lindon took Molloy for Minuit. Held a step below the top only because Molloy and Malone meurt took the first steps of the turn this book completes.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge is lost. The unbroken paragraph is the voice’s inability to pause. The sentence withdraws its claims as it makes them, and the book names its method as a question: “By aporia pure and simple?” Recast as an essay, its matter would assert that the self cannot be found; as it stands, it performs the search and the failure, and the failure is lived through clause by clause. The sequence is a reduction: surrogates proposed, inhabited and disowned in turn, the earlier heroes, Mahood twice, then Worm, who cannot even be a surrogate. The last sentence runs on by commas with no full stop until the last word, so the form does what the words say. Held off the top where, in the middle, the monotony becomes a container for argument rather than its instrument.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Evidence rather than promise. Maurice Blanchot answered the book in its own year, in “Où maintenant ? Qui maintenant ?” (Nouvelle Revue française, 1953), collected in Le Livre à venir (1959), and read it as literature’s encounter with a voice that has no one behind it; Alain Badiou has written on Beckett repeatedly. The questions stay open. Who speaks? Are the masters the voice’s masters, or the voice itself? Is Worm before Mahood or beneath him? Is the last clause defeat or affirmation? The formal yield is real: the retracting sentence rewards slow reading, and the comedy is often seen only on return. Held below the top because its questions, though deep, are few and keep returning, and the book yields along one line.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The field is the French novel at mid-century and, through Beckett’s English, the novel in English. The intrinsic force is very high: the book found the limit of the novel, what remains when everything but a voice is taken away, and after it fiction had to know the limit was there; every later novel of pure voice is measured against it. Two things hold the axis here. Beckett’s reach runs at least as much through Waiting for Godot as through the trilogy, and none of the play’s is credited to this book; and the book is a terminus few could follow, so its influence works as a limit more than as a model, diffuse and hard to trace. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: published by the house of Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute, it stood beside the new novel without being of it; it entered thought through Blanchot; J. M. Coetzee wrote his doctorate on Beckett’s English fiction; and Luciano Berio set passages of it in the third movement of Sinfonia (1968 to 1969).
Score: 9.0 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over seventy-three years. The text survives whole, as Beckett published it: in print with Minuit since 1953 and in Beckett’s English since 1958, alone and in the trilogy, and translated widely. Its presence is continuous. It is taught in universities in French and in English, Berio set it, and its last clause is quoted far beyond the book’s readers. The surface is not fixed to its moment: apart from a chophouse near the Paris shambles, nothing in it belongs to the 1940s. Held where it is for two reasons. Its presence is narrower than that of Waiting for Godot, and lies mostly in the academy and among serious readers. And at seventy-three years it has only just entered the span in which survival is shown.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged on the French, with Beckett’s English beside it. The prose is a deliberately plain French of short clauses, joined by commas and continuing past every stopping point. Its command shows in rhythm and timing held across a paragraph the length of a book: the deflation in mid-clause, the turn of a self-correction, the joke left unremarked, the quickening of the last sentence. The Mahood stories show narrative command in small, a family dying in the rotunda told in the voice’s offhand register. The making carries the weight, because the retracting syntax is the argument. The English, a second making rather than a copy, shows how much the French construction holds. Held below the top because the deliberate monotony costs in the middle, and at times the mechanism of retraction hardens into a tic.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Mahood’s farce, the crutches, the household dying in the rotunda, the jar with its menu; and Worm, a being with no voice, no story and no place. Or take the opening questions and the last sentence. One law governs them all: every utterance is provisional, every surrogate is invented, inhabited and disowned, and the voice must continue. Even the contradictions keep that law, since self-contradiction is the book’s physics, not a lapse in it. The range of register is wider than the book’s reputation allows: farce, polemic against the masters, grief, theology, the comedy of a narrator who cannot trust his own grammar. Held here because the world is narrow by design, and narrowness is not coherence: the range lies in register, not in matter.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The book holds consciousness at full depth: one mind’s inability to coincide with itself, given more completely than almost anywhere in fiction. It holds language as an order of reality in its own right. It holds the sacred, in the masters, the penance and the talk of God; the family, grotesquely, in Mahood’s household; the city and its trade, in the chophouse, the shambles and the menu on the jar; the body, reduced to a trunk; time and death. What holds the axis here is what is absent: labour, the state, history and the natural order, and the absence is the method. The book claims to hold everything by holding the one who would say it, and the claim is earned for consciousness and thin for the world, which is present as debris, not as an order held.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve and The Living Form at 9.4, then The Made at 9.3. The largest turn the novel had then taken, from Joyce’s totality to an art of taking away, staked by a writer barely published; a single paragraph that is the voice’s inability to pause, closing on a sentence with no full stop until its last word; and a plain French of short clauses whose retracting syntax is the argument.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8, held by what is absent: labour, the state, history and the natural order, with the world present as debris rather than as an order held; the claim to hold everything by holding the one who would say it is earned for consciousness and thin for the world. Next above it, The Inevitable and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6: perhaps a tenth of the long middle allowed rather than required, and particulars dissolved on purpose, Mahood alone staying particular in full. Then The Sublime at 8.7, where the heights are great and the grey middle passes without lift.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.4, The Made at 9.3, The Inner Law at 9.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Swerve at 9.4, The Unconcealment at 9.1, Pressure on Tradition at 9.0, The Imperishable at 9.0 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, the last by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below 8.6, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. 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 L’Innommable, a novel written in French and published by Éditions de Minuit, Paris, in 1953. It is scored on the French original, as the third novel of the trilogy and on its own; Molloy and Malone meurt (both Minuit, 1951) are its context, not the work. The English is The Unnamable (Grove Press, New York, 1958), translated by Beckett alone. It serves two purposes: it is the English quoted on this page, beneath the French where both are certain, and it is the version of the book this reading knows across its whole length. It was chosen because it is the author’s own, a second making rather than a copy. Every axis is judged on the French, and nothing in the English is charged to the work or credited to it. The French is known here in its close and in some phrases, less fully across its length; its sound line by line is 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: the opening questions, “I, say I. Unbelieving.”, the dismissal of the earlier heroes and the naming of the method in the English, and the last clause in French above English. Everything else is paraphrased. Blanchot’s essay is cited as the record of the book’s reception and is not part of the work. Facts that could not be verified, among them the dates of composition, the length of the book, the French order of the opening questions, the cause of the family’s death in the rotunda, the street of the chophouse, a later name for the proprietress, Beckett’s reported words on where the book left him, the staging of the trilogy as monologue, and several later writers placed in its line, are not given.