Samuel Beckett in Confinement: the Politics of Closed Space by James Little

Author:James Little
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

‘From self estranged’: Learning to say ‘I’

As is the case with Beckett’s decision to write in French, his move from the predominantly third-person narratives of the prewar prose to the first-person narrators of the postwar prose is not a clear-cut shift but more ‘a series of blurry zigzags’ (Slote 2015: 114). In other words, Beckett’s use of the first-person pronoun needs to be understood in terms of a gradual learning process during the 1930s and 1940s: a process which included experiments with the first person in prose work such as ‘Ding-Dong’ and Watt, poems such as the collection Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates (1935), the ‘Petit Sot’ poems (written 1938–9) and ‘Match Nul ou L’Amour Paisible’ (written 1938) as well as in his diaries, letters and essays. Before discussing an early example, in ‘Serena I’, of a pronominal form which plays an important role in The Unnamable’s later denarration of the first-person narrative voice, I will focus on a selection of Beckett’s poetry, paying particular attention to the use of the first person in the ‘Petit Sot’ collection, the pronominal idiosyncrasies of his translations of Guillaume Apollinaire’s ‘Zone’ (1912; Beckett’s translation 1950) and the differing valences of translated pronouns in Beckett’s ‘they come’ (1946).

The so-called ‘Petit Sot’ collection is a series of remarkably unusual efforts to say ‘I’.5 There is one long poem entitled ‘les joues rouges’, which Beckett described as one of two ‘straightforward descriptive poems (in French), of episodes in the life of a child’ (SB to TM, 18 April 1939, LSB I: 657).6 While ‘les joues rouges’ describes the hatred felt by the ‘Petit Sot’ [little fool] from a third-person perspective (qtd in Atik 2001: 10), there are also twenty-one shorter poems which are written from this figure’s own point of view. Sixteen start with the first-person pronoun and four – very unusually for Beckett’s poetry – open with the phrase ‘je suis’ [I am] (UoR MS 5479: 258–63).7 These shorter poems are declarative rather than purely descriptive, with the figure of the ‘Petit Sot’ a crucial, shifting lens through which the rest of the world is imagined. As Beckett’s use of the image of the ‘wombtomb’ in his prose of the 1930s demonstrates, images of confinement are central to the self-estrangement of his early protagonists. Confinement is also found in his poetry. Recalling Belacqua’s self-made judas hole in Dream, the speaker of ‘Le Grenier’ stays close in his attic to a ‘hublot’ [deadlight], retreating into a space where ‘[p]ersonne ne me trouvera’ [no one will find me] (UoR MS 5479: 261).8 This use of an aperture of minimal size also recalls Beckett’s attempt to create ‘light in the monad’ in Murphy, but in ‘Le Grenier’ the perspective has shifted and, in this first-person description of ‘2 places’, light comes from without to the speaker confined within his hiding place.

This shift towards a homodiegetic first-person narrative in a confined space was also central to the composition of Watt during the wartime years. However, the effort to say ‘I’ in Beckett’s poetry did not last for long after the war.

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