Incredible Modernism by Rosenquist Rod Attridge John

Author:Rosenquist, Rod,Attridge, John
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2016-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

Malone Lies: Veracity and Morality in Malone Dies

Samuel Cross

‘I can say nothing that is not true’, says Malone, moribund narrator of the second novel in Samuel Beckett’s ‘trilogy’.1 Regardless of how one understands ‘truth’, this is a suspicious proposition no matter who utters it. In Malone’s mouth, it is hard even to begin to take seriously, and easy to take unseriously. After all, Malone has at this point already spent 50 pages contradicting himself, expressing doubt and confusion about such basic information as his present location, his identity and whether or not experiences he remembers belong to him. Add to this the fact that Malone’s style of speech is neurotically self-corrective and self-negating, rarely permitting even the simplest statement of fact to stand unqualified, and the prospects for his perfect correctness become slim indeed.

The full thought from which the above clause is drawn runs: ‘But I tell myself so many things, what truth is there in all this babble? I don’t know. I simply believe I can say nothing that is not true, I mean that has not happened, it’s not the same thing but no matter’ (MD 236). Those familiar with Beckett’s collection of novel narrators will be unsurprised at Malone’s epistemological fuzziness and tergiversation; all of these speakers, none more than the dying or dead men who voice the Trilogy, describe a world whose largest and smallest details they are uncertain about, the only guarantors of those details being the speakers’ ever-decaying memories. Beckett termed these figures ‘narrator/narrated’ because the props of implicitly circumambient reality so important to the traditional realist novel are entirely removed.2 The speakers communicate their personal view of the world which is also the only view given about the real world as a whole as it exists in the novel. They are, for their readers, the only measures of reality.

It might seem to follow fairly quickly from this observation that Malone’s world is one about which it is not possible for him to be mistaken, and that thus, his claim to permanent veracity is false, but trivially so. On this reasoning, he can say nothing that is true or false because the relevant ideas do not apply. In most novels, a reader can at certain moments see that a character errs about his or her world. The effect is typically ironic or humorous, and often central to our appreciation of the novel. It is surely one of Beckett’s most important innovations to have completely removed the possibility of such readerly double-vision from even the most perceptive readings of his later novels, but it would also seem to mean that we cannot doubt what Malone tells us because there is no comprehensible way in which we could imagine Malone doubting himself, much less imagine ourselves doubting him. If there is no method by which Malone can assess the truth of his statements about the world he lives in (as there seems in almost every case not to be), and if there are no facts

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