Company by Samuel Beckett

First published:Compagnie, 1980 (English translation, 1980)

Type of work: Internal narrative

Time of work: The unspecified present

Locale: In the mind of the creator

Principal Characters:

• A Voice, which comes to one in the dark
• A Listener, who lies on his back in the dark
• Another, devising it all for company
• The Father, who wanders the moors during his son’s birth
• The Son, who remembers his childhood and youth

The Novel

“That then is the proposition. To one on his back in the dark a voice tells of the past.” The action of Company is fundamentally the narration of stories by a voice to a listener lying in the typical Beckettian darkness. Some of the elements of the story are verifiable, some are conjecture, some are prediction. Like all Samuel Beckett’s prose work, the narrative voice is that of the author, unable to cease telling stories, unable to express, yet obligated to express. Typical literary inquiries concerning the source of the voice, the identity of the supine figure on the ground, or the placement of the setting and time into a recognizable frame, cannot be satisfied in Beckettian novels; they are self-generating and self-referential, a trait of most postmodern fiction.

Uncharacteristic of Beckett’s earlier prose, Company almost finds a way to discuss the undiscussable. It contains, embedded in the never-ending question of the reliability of the narrator, some poignant possible facts from a recognizable past, stories of childhood, and unforgettable moments in the memory of the listener. The narrative proceeds by a series of anecdotes told about the listener’s childhood and youth. One story concerns the mother’s reprimand at the child’s innocent question about the nearness of the sky: “She shook off your little hand and made you a cutting retort you have never forgotten,” the voice tells the listener. Another story describes the day of the listener’s birth and his father’s “tramp in the mountains” to avoid the noise and uneasiness of childbirth; suddenly, it is the listener himself who trudges along the narrow roads in the barren landscape. By means of stylistic techniques (perfected over a lifetime of writing in two languages), Beckett equates the listener with his father, whose “shade” accompanies him, “in his old tramping rags. Finally on side by side from nought anew.”

Other stories keep the listener “company”: an old woman who thought she could fly, who tells the child “God save you little master”; the day the child throws himself off the top of a great fir, the branches breaking his fall; the hedgehog rescued by the child, only to die in its cage. As the stories unfold, they are punctuated with further descriptions of the father/child wandering in all weather through the moors outside his home. Interspersed with the incessant self-examinations of the listener, the final story to be pieced together is a love story involving an assignation in a log summerhouse, a girl with long dark hair, and a quiet moment before the cycle of birth and old age begins again.

Yet the most important “story” of Company, which encompasses all the rest of the anecdotes, the wanderings in the landscape, and the attempts at asserting epistemological truth, is the story of the need for “company.” This story is Beckett’s way of expressing the mind’s predilection for memories, for “peopling” one’s musings with recognizable characters and incidents from one’s real or imagined past. Thus the author, “devising it all for company,” both invents and remembers, in order to avoid admitting the final existential fact: There is no company; we are alone.

The Characters

The term “character” does not apply comfortably to Beckett’s novels, but three figures form the main narrative in Company: a voice, disembodied, neutral, without inflection, speaking in the second person (“You stand at the tip of the high board.... You are alone in the garden”); a listener, on his back in the dark, signified by the third person (“So with what reason remains he reasons”); and “another” who hears the voice speaking to the listener and ponders, “Is he not perhaps overhearing a communication not intended for him?”

By exploiting the ambiguities inherent in pronouns with vague antecedents, Beckett manages to blend the three “characters” into one unnamed (because unnameable) first-person narrator who has “devised for company” not only the normative characters residing in the stories (Mrs. Coote and Dr. Hadden, for example) but also the speaking voice, the listener, and himself. This “author” (a word Beckett does not use here) combines the traits of all three: self-examining, suspicious by nature of the truth of all narration, obsessed with logic, overcareful of conclusions. It is, in fact, the singular creation which is found in all Beckett’s prose work—the self-narrative presence, Beckett’s fictive equivalent of the self-defining existential man.

Two other characters deserve consideration as well. Through a technique of gradual revelation, the father figure walking the moors becomes quite real to the reader. He is dispassionate toward his son at birth, challenging of him in youth (“He calls to you to jump. He calls, Be a brave boy”). The portrait is one of reserve, of noncommunication, of isolation. The son as well becomes known to the reader: Sensitive to his parents’ scorn, a loner, he tries to capture the warm glow of their approval, but it dims quickly. After an unresolved love affair, he becomes old like his father, wandering the snowy pastures as he did, head bowed, listening to his own footsteps.

Critical Context

The long novels of Beckett’s earlier career, followed in the 1950’s by dramatic work such as En attendant Godot (1952; Waiting for Godot, 1954) and Fin de partie (1957; Endgame, 1958), were in turn succeeded by shorter and shorter prose pieces, considered by some as mere exercises in anticipation of yet another great prose work. It seemed that Beckett was following the patterns of his fictive counterparts, with longer and longer pauses between shorter and shorter “failures to not express.” Minimalist pieces such as Pour finir encore et autres foirades (1976; Fizzles, 1976), a series of half-starts lasting only a page or two each, seemed to indicate that Beckett was simply emptying his notebooks of previous exercises or intentionally publishing fragments of what was to be a major final masterpiece. Surprisingly, Company, although fairly short, is a three-dimensional, fully articulated work. There is no sense that the piece is a part of something larger; on the contrary, it expresses with considerable economy the whole spectrum of Beckett’s gifts, reflecting the storytelling qualities of Murphy (1938), the exasperating logic of Watt (1953), the ontological forlornness of Waiting for Godot, and the philosophical complexity of his trilogy: Molloy (1951; English translation, 1955), Malone meurt (1951; Malone Dies, 1956), and L’Innommable (1953; The Unnamable, 1958).

Beckett’s prose work is often adapted to radio and the stage. Company was given a reading on the British Broadcasting Corporation by Patrick Magee (1980), and staged versions have been attempted at the National Theatre (London, 1980) and Mabou Mines (New York, 1983).

Bibliography

Fehsenfeld, Martha. “Beckett’s Late Works: An Appraisal,” in Modern Drama. XXV (September, 1982), pp. 355-362.

Kalb, Jonathan. “Monologue of Solitude: Mabou Mines’ Company,” in Theatre. XIV (Summer/Fall, 1983), p. 67.

Mitchell, Breon. “Beckett Bibliography: New Works, 1976-1982,” in Modern Fiction Studies. XXIX (Spring, 1983), pp. 131-152.

Read, David. “Artistic Theory in the Work of Samuel Beckett,” in Journal of Beckett Studies. No. 8 (Autumn, 1982), pp. 7-22.