Ill Seen Ill Said by Samuel Beckett

First published:Mal vu mal dit, 1981 (English translation, 1981)

Type of work: Antistory

Time of work: Unspecified

Locale: Unspecified; a generalized rural location

Principal Character:

• She, the protagonist, and perhaps the narrator, an old woman who is nearing her end

The Novel

While he is best known as a playwright, Samuel Beckett’s devotion to fiction and the novel predates by many years his involvement with the theater and has proceeded in tandem with it, giving to his entire output a unity and continuity which his plays, when taken alone, do not provide. It may be argued that the serious student must confront Beckett’s fiction in order to attain full exposure to the intellectual and aesthetic range and challenge of this twentieth century master.

Evidence of his commitment to fiction is perhaps most impressively provided by the series of works written in the 1970’s and 1980’s. The term “series” is used here merely for descriptive convenience: The author himself does not apply it to his later fiction, for reasons which readers familiar with the Beckett persona will readily understand. Having come to an apparent standstill imaginatively in his fiction with Comment c’est (1961; How It Is, 1964), and having conducted a number of crucial fictional experiments thereafter, notably in Imagination morte imaginez (1965; Imagination Dead Imagine, 1965), Beckett inaugurated the series in question with Pour finir encore et autres foirades (1976; Fizzles, 1976).

Ill Seen Ill Said is typical of the author’s later work in a number of ways, and these ways in turn constitute the critique of fiction which is an underlying preoccupation of these works and which links them to Beckett’s earlier fiction. In terms of locale, for example, the fewer features provided, the truer the text is to its minimalist, terminal spirit. The countryside is unpromising, infertile, and menaced by the ring of stones which surrounds it. Sheep graze, but only in order to underline the insistently antipastoral character of the place. Seasons take their round, but with little discernible effect. Translated into human terms, the protagonist’s cabin is furnished with the bare essentials, though among them is the apparent luxury of curtains, required by the rituals of sighting and perceiving which occupy a large portion of the solitary protagonist’s time.

Just as such traditional fictional expectations as “social milieu” and “material representation” are confounded in Ill Seen Ill Said, so is the concept of action. The protagonist, marked by the restlessness which is characteristic of Beckett’s characters, journeys back and forth to a grave. These irresistible treks, which the gravestone seems to command, are performed without is-sue, without acknowledged purpose, and without end. “She” is in the grip of an action rather than in command of one. The result is that the stone—a stylized outcrop of the terrain—has more power and meaning than anything the protagonist or the reader can create for it. In addition, as though to complete, or to make consistent, the ethos of dearth around which the fiction is structured, the protagonist is prevented from attaining significance for her-self or from attaching it to the territory beyond herself. The subjects ofIll Seen Ill Said, therefore, are ignorance, emptiness, and untranslated sensory experience.

Stylistically, Ill Seen Ill Said is painfully simple and direct, minimally punctuated yet resourceful, and even, on occasion, amusing. The narrative exhibits a superficial sense of continuity, but continuity is of less significance than contiguity, circularity, repetition, and inconclusiveness. Such strategies oblige the reader to come to terms with a text rather than to perform the more familiar exercise of reading a story. The unlikely collaboration between language and nonentity once again is both product and source of a Beckett work.

The Characters

The protagonist of Ill Seen Ill Said is, surprisingly for Beckett’s fiction, a woman. Superficially, the protagonist suggests a specific feminine archetype. With her long white hair, black dress, waxen pallor, and remote habitat, “she” appears to be a witch. Nevertheless, such a figure seems to be suggested only in order to help the reader discover that the association is of no interpretive assistance. The inference is that attempts to decode and enlarge upon the protagonist’s existential poverty are misleading. This conclusion seems to be underlined by her lack of other feminine connotations, as suggested by the barrenness of her surroundings and her childlessness. “She” is a woman in order that gender be rendered inconsequential.

The protagonist’s most salient feature, her eye, has nothing to do with her putative femininity. This obdurate organ is what connects her with a perceivable world. It admits light and the objects that light illuminates, and its unflinching operation lends its owner a Cyclopean power and fixity. As in the case of the protagonist’s femininity, however, the nature of the eye is not natural. The connections, facilitated by the optic nerve, between world and thinking mind are nonexistent in this case. Instead of an interaction between perceiver and perceived, Beckett depicts a disjunction between them. The protagonist, therefore, maintains a fidelity to a world which she cannot comprehend—the world of stone. At the same time, she exists in a realm of mental processes which occur without the immediate or obvious stimulus of external phenomena. In effect, the protagonist is less a character, or a woman, than she is an eye. In addition, she is less an eye than she is an instrument of process, even if the process in this case is denoted by its rarity.

A reading which suggests that “she” consists of two disparate zones—one unthinkingly in thrall to the world of things, the other submerged in the world of mind—seems more consistent than one claiming that there is more than one character in Ill Seen Ill Said. Nevertheless, the text does seem to support the latter reading as well. Some of this evidence is provided by the presence of a narrative voice which intermittently interjects advice and encouragement during the course of the narrative. The unexpected prominence of such a presence does not necessarily argue for the existence of what might be called an “independent narrator,” an authority similar to the omniscient narrator of more conventional fictions, but one who has let slip the mask of his omniscience. The manner in which the narrative voice is introduced at the beginning of the work seems calculated to alert the reader to the existence within the text of two different, mutually exclusive subjects. The first considers the realm of phenomena; the second deals with imaginative resources.

The protagonist’s reality, or destiny, is to shift unknowingly from one of these areas to the other in a manner which seems apprehensible only to the reader, not to “she” herself. For her to know the form she inhabits would bring a deceptive certainty and stasis to her condition—deceptive since, in the interests of stability, it would suppress all that can undermine it. Thus the protagonist is a persuasive embodiment of uncertainty and irresolvability, an embodiment of the auxiliary “may,” which needs a verb to achieve itself but which is not deprived of its meaning when standing alone. “She” convinces the reader of the reality of her existence. Near as she is to a condition of finality—death—the protagonist is not there yet and so may exemplify only the antithesis of finality.

Critical Context

Beckett’s reputation as one of twentieth century literature’s most impenitent, and perhaps eccentric, innovators was assured long before he embarked on the short novels of his career’s later years. As well as being as inventive and filled with integrity as any of his earlier works, they also provide, in a more lyric, chaste, distilled form, many of the philosophical and aesthetic concerns of a writer who has devoted his career to performing the burial rites of Romanticism.

Ill Seen Ill Said is an expression of an extraordinary singularity and consistency of artistic vision—so much so, in fact, that it is tempting to regard it, together with the two other central works of the series, Company (1980) and Worstward Ho (1983), as constituting a redaction of the critically acclaimed trilogy, Molloy (1951; English translation, 1955), Malone meurt (1951; Malone Dies, 1956), and L’Innommable (1953; The Unnamable, 1958). Such a view, however, is not necessary. Ill Seen Ill Said can readily be appreciated as a work which speaks for itself in the artistic tone and philosophical idiom which has made Samuel Beckett an important voice in modern literature.

Bibliography

Bair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett: A Biography, 1978.

Ben-Zvi, Linda. Samuel Beckett, 1986.

Coe, Richard N. Beckett, 1964.

Knowlson, James, and John Pilling. Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett, 1980.

Pilling, John. Samuel Beckett, 1976.