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Beckett’s Parisian Ghosts (Continued)
The Case of the Missing Jules Renard
Angela Moorjani
FROM HIS LETTERS TO THOMAS MACGREEVY, WE KNOW THAT BECKETT
read Jules Renard’s Journal in the first part of 1931, only a few years after it
was first published, and that he was again or still reading Renard in 1938
(Beckett, Letters 69, 643). Renard’s Journal, which covers the twenty-four
years from 1887 to 1910, the year of his death at age forty-six, is
unfortunately available only in truncated form. Still, even though heavily
censored and cut, the Journal encompassed four volumes when it first
appeared in 1925-27; in the later Pléiade edition, it stretches on for more
than 1000 pages. Because the four volumes of the first edition remained in
Beckett’s personal library until his death, it would appear that he never
stopped dipping into them.1 It is a great loss for genetic criticism that after
retrieving them from the publisher, Madame Renard burned the original
fifty-four manuscript notebooks. Perhaps an uncensored copy exists
somewhere yet to be discovered (see Guichard, “Note” xxi-xxiv; and
Bouillier i-iii, xxix).
ANGELA MOORJANI is Professor Emerita of French and intercultural studies at the University of
Maryland-UMBC. Her many publications on repetition and melancholy in literature and the arts
include Abysmal Games in the Novels of Samuel Beckett, The Aesthetics of Loss and Lessness, and Beyond Fetishism
and Other Excursions in Psychopragmatics. She coedited (with Linda Ben-Zvi) Beckett at 100: Revolving It All
(Oxford UP), and her recent essays investigate gaze deixis, multitiered effects, and French cultural
ghosts in Beckett. With Sjef Houppermans, she is one of the two chief editors of Samuel Beckett
Today/Aujourd’hui.
Moorjani | The Case of the Missing Jules Renard
The question for Beckettians, however, is what attracted the 25-year-old
Beckett to Renard’s Journal, which even in its mutilated state came to be
considered not only Renard’s masterpiece but one of the major works of fin
de siècle France (Sigaux vii). In a Journal entry of 14 November 1900, Renard
himself, despite his fame as the author of Poil de carotte (the fiction of 1894
and the play of 1900), the novel L’Écornifleur of 1892, and the Histoires
naturelles of 1896, declares his Journal to be “ce que j’aurai fait de mieux et de
plus utile dans ma vie” ‘the best and most useful thing I will have done in
my life.’2 Stunningly complex, the Journal is a pleasure to read. It is not
unlike the modern blog in its profusion of heterogeneous entries, juxtaposed
without being stitched together, with no ascertainable pattern to its random
sequences of ironic self-scrutiny; reflections on style, literature, and theatre;
telling portraits of family, friends, and stars in the Parisian literary field;
documentary observations of life in his village in central France, where
Renard spent a part of each year; poetic descriptions of nature by this selfdescribed “voyeur de la nature” (Apr. 1898); and his Dreyfusard and
socialist political engagements. Sprinkled throughout are often witty
scenarios and dramatic dialogues—imaginary or overheard—and mordant
aphorisms. If this is a diary, it is in a form never encountered before.
Beckett’s interest in the “foxy” writer, as he wittily called Renard (Letters
73), was piqued at the time he was teaching French at Trinity and itching to
be free of academe to pursue a writing career. The thrill Beckett
experienced on discovering Renard’s Journal is described by Georges
Pelorson (1909-2008; later known as Georges Belmont), who was lecteur at
Trinity at the time. In Souvenirs d’outre-monde, basing the memories of his
friendship with Beckett on his notes from 1930-31, Belmont mentions
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several Journal entries that Beckett particularly savored. Among these are a
passage about the frigid relation between Renard and his mother (29 Dec.
1903) and the last lines of the Journal, predating Renard’s death by six weeks,
in which he documents his physical decline without pathos (Belmont 29293). Belmont goes on to quote his notes about Beckett’s admiration for the
author of the Journal: “Beckett porte aux nues Jules Renard. Dit qu’il aime
surtout deux choses chez lui: 1) la férocité à froid de sa lucidité sans illusion
sur les gens, à commencer par lui-même; 2) la sèche économie du style”
‘Beckett thinks the world of Jules Renard. Says that there are two things he
particularly likes about him: 1) his fierce, unflinching, and disillusioned
clear-sightedness about people, including himself; 2) his dry and economical
style’ (Belmont 293). In addition to his delight in Renard’s “satire intime”
‘self-satire’ (3 Aug. 1892), his style, and his realistic depictions of natural
functions, Beckett no doubt must have been impressed by the Journal’s
humorous take on melancholy: “Faire très gai de surface et tragique en
dessous” ‘Go in for the cheerful on the surface and the tragic underneath’
was one of Renard’s mottos (3 Aug. 1892).
Citing both Histoires naturelles and Poil de carotte (the fiction) in
correspondence with friends in the thirties (Letters 252, 442), Beckett most
likely would have also read Renard’s early avant-garde novel L’Écornifleur
(The Sponger), which—as Beckett’s Dream of Fair to Middling Women was to be—
is an ironic autofiction featuring a self-deprecating anti-hero. Renard’s
novel, though, is written with the economy of style that Beckett admired but
did not adopt for his Dream. Be that as it may, it appears that, in his
eagerness to disengage his voice from that of Joyce and his “heroic work,
heroic being,” as Beckett put it in a 1980 message (vii), he added Renard to
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the other modernist writers who had revolutionized fiction—Proust, Gide,
and Céline, to mention only the French ghosts—in order to buttress his own
apprenticeship as a writer.
Clearly Beckett was preparing to write his first novel when between 1930
and 1932 he began hoarding quotes, his “butin verbal” ‘verbal booty,’ as he
put it at the time (Letters 93). Was he encouraged perhaps by Renard who
saw in note-taking the equivalent in literature of practicing scales (18 Jan.
1896)? Among the almost 1200 items in Beckett’s “Dream” Notebook,
twenty-eight from Renard’s Journal are squeezed between passages from
Augustine’s Confessions and the Old Testament, some of which found their
way into the Belacqua fictions of the early thirties (see Pilling 30-34). Two
quick “foxy” quotes from Beckett’s Notebook as a sampling of Renard’s selfirony and contradictions: “Je suis un réaliste que gêne la réalité”3 ‘I’m a
realist who is disturbed by reality’ (13 June 1897), and “Je ne réponds pas
d’avoir du goût, mais j’ai le dégoût très sûr” ‘I don’t vouch for my taste, but
my distaste is beyond all doubt’ (19 March 1901).
Brief and knowing intertextual winks scattered throughout a text, however,
are not enough to make Renard one of Beckett’s Parisian ghosts. Literary
ghosts are powerful specters haunting a text and traversing the limits
between what is me and not-me. Harold Bloom, for whom modern
influence-anxiety is a form of melancholy (7), quotes André Malraux for
whom the hearts of the young contain graveyards inscribed with the names
of artists whose ghostly voices make them recognize the words of
“antagonistic” others within their own (Bloom 26). For Bloom (26) and more
recently for Giorgio Agamben (117), writers traditionally felt shame on
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uncovering these spectral voices of other selves echoing within their own.
The speaker of L’Innommable puts it perhaps most poignantly, vociferating
against both cultural and literary transmission: “Ces voix ne sont pas de
moi, ni ces pensées, mais des ennemis qui m’habitent” (123), with the
colonizing enemies morphing into devils in the English version: “These
voices are not mine, nor these thoughts, but the voices and thoughts of the
devils who beset me” (Three 347).
Such an antagonistic relation to literary and cultural spooks can be
understood as a protest against the desubjectifying influence of intertexts as
well as a political revolt against the ideological effects of the sinister voices
that make you think what they want you to think. In their place, some
writers, as we know, sought out a depersonalized anonymity and forms of
blank writing. The “heroic” authors are eclipsed by the antiheroic writers
who “livré[s] aux mots” ‘taken over by words’ as Maurice Blanchot was to
put it in his article on L’Innommable of 1953, must sacrifice themselves to their
oeuvre by becoming other and who in order to write “[sont] tombé[s] dans
l’absence de temps, là où il [leur] faut mourir d’une mort sans fin” ‘have
fallen into timelessness where [they] must die a death without end’ (686).
The “death of the author,” which was to have a brilliant career in the sixties,
was already under way in earlier decades of the century.
So, the question now becomes, is Renard an antagonistic ghost or enemy
that Beckett has to revolt against in shame, or is he, rather, a literary
doppelgänger who has introduced a parallel path announcing the otherness
of writing, its desubjectifying effects, and its pact with silence and death?
Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1945 essay, entitled “L’Homme ligoté: notes sur le Journal
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de Jules Renard,” suggests that Renard was a liminal figure, straddling the
divide between a 19th-century author and a 20th-century writer struggling
against language.4 For Sartre (288), surprising as this may seem, Renard is
directly or indirectly at the origin of contemporary literature, that is, the
literature of the time when Beckett was composing his postwar fiction and
theatre in French. Sartre begins his essay with the claim that Renard’s
“réalisme du silence” ‘realism of silence,’ his “se taire par écrit” ‘being silent
in writing’ (271-72) developed into the later literature of silence: “Il a créé la
litérature du silence” ‘he created the literature of silence,’ Sartre maintains,
while pointing to Maurice Blanchot as the writer best following Renard’s
lead (271). A few years later, in his article on L’Innommable, Blanchot in turn
was to recognize in Beckett’s text a “parole errante” ‘rootless utterance’ in
which “le silence éternellement se parle” ‘silence speaks itself endlessly’
(678). Blanchot sets up maneuvers, Sartre maintains in his essay on Renard,
“où les mots sont soigneusement choisis pour s’annuler entre eux et qui
ressemblent à ces opérations algébriques compliquées, dont le résultat doit
être zéro. Formes exquises du terrorisme” ‘where words are carefully chosen
to cancel each other out, and which resemble those complex algebraic
operations that must add up to zero. Exquisite forms of terrorism’ (271).
Sartre then goes on to relate such “autodestruction du langage” (272) to
Blanchot’s and Georges Bataille’s skeptical view of knowledge: For these
theorists, knowledge that is contemplated “du point de vue du non-savoir,
c’est-à-dire de l’au-delà du savoir, devient non-savoir” ‘from the point of
view of unknowingness, that is, from beyond knowing, becomes
unknowingness (Sartre 274).
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This unknowingness and syntax of silence inherited from Renard, which
resemble a semantic zero or, as Roland Barthes would have it, a “degré
zéro,” resonate for me with the first self-contradictory paragraph of Molloy,
in which each utterance is contradicted by the next, and by the act of selfcancellation with which the novel ends. The rest of Beckett’s trilogy and
Textes pour rien and indeed En attendant Godot accentuate these maneuvers. In
their essays on Molloy and the trilogy—Bataille’s 1951 “Le Silence de
Molloy” and Maurice Nadeau’s 1952 “Samuel Beckett ou le droit au
silence” ‘Samuel Beckett or the Right to Silence’—these influential thinkers
too saw in Beckett an adept of the contemporary literature of silence that
Sartre traced to Renard and associated with Blanchot. Fifty some years
later, in Le Voisin de zéro, Hélène Cixous echoes their views in maintaining
that in Beckett’s texts, “La parole parle. La parole se coupe la parole” ‘Talk
talks. Talk interrupts its talk’ (23). It was not until many years later that
Beckett would follow the other strategy that Sartre found to be Renard’s: “la
concision absolue” ‘extreme conciseness’ as the closest approximation to
silence (272-73).5
Within the limits of an article, I can only begin to suggest some of the
many other ways in which Renard’s spectral trace is palpable in Beckett’s
texts or where their paths converge. Renard’s and Beckett’s amusing
manipulation of clichés and turns of phrase, perverting them or making
them self-destruct, is one such instance. Another “foxy” example:
“L’homme est un animal qui ne raisonne presque pas” ‘A human being is an
animal that barely thinks’ (22 Apr. 1905). It goes without saying that
Renard’s anti-humanist tendency is shared by the author of L’Innommable.
Another distorted turn of phrase from Renard’s Journal: “Oui, dit-il: je l’ai
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échappé laide” [for “échappé beau”] ‘Yes, he said: I am badly out of it’ [for
‘I am well out of it’] (16 June 1894). This quip, which found its way into
Beckett’s “Dream” Notebook (qtd. in Pilling 32), is echoed in Molloy’s “la
voici, ma solution, dans toute sa hideur” [for “dans toute sa beauté”] “here
it is [my solution] in all its hideousness” [for “in all its beauty”] (109; Three
72). For Cixous, such deformations are “du déjà entendu devenu encorejamais-entendu” ‘the already heard of become the still-unheard-of (23).
A further parallel cannot help but be noticed by psychoanalytically
informed readers. Both writers’ conflicted relation to their mothers and the
oedipal nightmares and parodies they wove into their autofictions help to
explain Beckett’s “jubilation” (Belmont 292) on reading about Renard’s
planned civility on receiving his mother at the train station that petered out
in a token greeting and two kisses “avec des lèvres jointes, desséchées” ‘with
pressed together, parched lips’ (29 Dec. 1903). Some of Renard’s most
sardonic journal entries concern his parents: “Ah! que n’ai-je, moi aussi, en
naissant coûté la vie à ma mère!” ‘Oh! if only I too in being born had cost
my mother her life!’ (18 Feb. 1901). He likes to think he is not his father’s
son, fears for his life at times in his father’s presence, and admits to a guilty
conscience for not having loved his father as he should have (18 and 21 Feb.
1901; 4 Aug. 1902). In the trilogy of the forties and in the later From an
Abandoned Work, similarly truculent questions “float up, out of an old depth”
for Beckett’s first-person narrators: “My father, did I kill him too as well as
my mother, perhaps in a way I did” (Abandoned 159-60). Both writers
emphasize the guilt attached to such lugubrious thoughts: “Ces heures où, je
ne sais pourquoi, j’ai envie de me punir” ‘These moments when, I don’t
know why, I feel like punishing myself’ (Renard 7 Jan. 1905), which brings
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to mind Molloy’s refrain at the beginning of his journey to his mother, “It’s
my fault. Fault? That was the word. But what fault?” (Three 8).
Before focusing more closely on the two writers’ grappling with parental
traumas, let us examine the self-division implied in the Oedipus drama, with
special attention to Molloy. In this novel, the split into two parts and two
narrators-protagonists serves to enact the doubleness of the Oedipal myth,
in which the protagonist is both the innocent seeker of a guilty other and the
guilty quarry sought. For Renard, all authentic writing, which he identifies
with self-writing and self-division, involves such unraveling of authorial unity
and control: “Il y a les conteurs et les écrivains. On conte ce qu’on veut; on
n’écrit pas ce qu’on veut: on n’écrit que soi-même” ‘There are storytellers
and writers. You tell what you like; you don’t write what you like; you only
write your self’ (1 May 1898). Gustave Flaubert, with his notorious
“Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” would not have contradicted him. Further,
recognizing the scattered, fragmented, and estranged subject of self-writing,
Renard describes, some ten years before Freud’s 1908 essay on “Creative
Writers and Daydreaming,” “Des sortes de rêves que je fais debout, comme
si toute mon inconscience chassait ma conscience et se mettait à sa place.
Ces images brusquement venues, je ne les connais pas. Et comme je ne peux
les nier, qu’elles sont bien là, en moi, il faut croire qu’elles sont d’un autre
moi, et que je suis double” ‘Kinds of dreams that I have while awake, as if
my entire unconscious banished my consciousness and put itself in its place.
I don’t recognize these images that suddenly appear. And since I cannot
deny them, that they are there, in me, I have to believe that they are by
another me, and that I am double’ (23 Dec. 1897). When the secret agent
Moran daydreams about his quarry Molloy, who takes over his conscious
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self in the manner of Renard’s unconscious double, he inquires, “For who
could have spoken to me of Molloy if not myself and to whom if not to
myself could I have spoken of him?” (Three 112). With the eruption of this
other self and other text within his, Moran is turned into the opposite of
himself, unable to recognize the mirror image and writing that are and are
not his. Beckett in Molloy, as it were, gives fictional form to the writerly
daydream of an estranged other, the experience of “self-writers” that
Renard portrays so poignantly in his Journal.
And now to the family drama. In Poil de carotte, the fictionalized
autobiography of his childhood in forty-eight tightly composed sketches and
an “album” of thirty even briefer snapshots, Renard succeeds—as his
contemporary Paul Hervieu remarked—in mixing the tragic with the comic,
the hilarious with the harrowing in staging the ferocity he suffered at the
hands of his mother and the indifference of his father to his childhood pains
(qtd. in Guichard, Œuvres 658). Intent on debunking clichéd literary
idealizations—the romantic hero, angelic woman, innocent child, loving
parent, and wholesome peasant—Renard focused on the bodily needs,
frailties, and functions humans share with animals and used irony to
uncover the self-serving or cruel impulses underlying their actions. He went
beyond his own literary ghosts Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant in bringing
excretion and sexual foibles, including in childhood, under his coolly ironic
gaze. In the interest of such demystifying maneuvers, Renard most likely
inflated the flaws of both Madame Lepic, the fictional name of the hateful
mother, and those of her youngest son nicknamed Poil de carotte (Carrot
Top), red-haired and freckled like the author. If the prejudice against red
hair contributed to the youngest child’s status as the family scapegoat, he is
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nevertheless no paragon of childhood innocence, disconcertingly weighing
in at times as a victimizing victim. The brief vignettes of Renard’s
autofiction bring to mind Beckett’s own fictionalized sketches of his
childhood and youth in Company and to a lesser extent the conflictual
relations in Molloy between Molloy and his mother and Moran and Jacques,
in which the abject and bodily decay are foregrounded à la Renard. Perhaps
it would not be amiss to attribute, in part, to the author of Poil de carotte the
emphasis on the abject that was to develop in twentieth-century literature,
with Georges Bataille, among others, following Renard’s lead.
For Renard, who, as we have seen, maintains that all writing by authentic
writers is self-writing, the autobiographical and fictional intermingle
throughout his oeuvre. In his Journal, begun when he was twenty-three,
Renard frequently refers to his parents as the fictional Lepics and to himself
as Poil de carotte. In an astonishing entry of 18 October 1896, entitled “Poil
de carotte secret,” Renard, who is thirty-two years old at the time, tells of his
terror-inducing mother sexually arousing him when she changed clothes in
front of him as a child. In harrowing nightmares recurring during his adult
life, he has passionate sex with his mother who is offering himself to him.
Monsieur Lepic, lost in his newspaper, takes no notice. Immediately
afterwards, mother and son having reverted to their usual hostility, he
throws his mother on the floor, tramples her underfoot, grinding her face
into the kitchen tiles. Renard tells of the terrible anguish this recurring
nightmare made him suffer. Small wonder that a doctoral student at the
Medical Faculty of Paris, picking up on Renard’s ambivalent relation to
both parents, wrote an insightful thesis—albeit a brief one—on Le Complexe
d’Œdipe dans l’œuvre et la vie de Jules Renard (see Rolland).
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The oedipal torments that Renard chronicled at the turn of the twentieth
century had become more or less a psychoanalytic commonplace three
decades later, Freud having introduced the complex in a 1910 article.6 That
in itself helps to explain why, when Beckett, who acquired his extensive
psychoanalytic knowledge in the thirties, riddled his postwar French fiction
with oedipal allusions, he obscured these to the extend that they were missed
by many readers. Nevertheless, in his anti-oedipal parodies Beckett is once
again chiming with and perhaps echoing Renard. For Molloy, the
nightmarish image of his mother mingling with the grotesque memories of
sexual encounters with other haglike women is “literally unendurable, like
being crucified, I don’t know why and I don’t want to” (Three 59). And to
communicate with the blind, deaf, and incontinent Mag, at once an object
of love and hate, need and revenge, whom he takes to be his mother and
who takes him to be his father, he thumps her on the head (Three 17-18). It
would be difficult to imagine a less idealized maternal figure than Mag,
Beckett here outdoing the debunking conceits of his predecessor.
It is, however, Malone, another of Beckett’s writerly surrogates, and his
entries into his notebook, who is most closely haunted by Renard. Whereas
Renard took on the identity of his fictional substitute, Beckett embedded
heteronymic surrogates of his writing self into his postwar texts. Molloy,
Moran, Malone, the speaker of The Unnamable, all claim to be the authors of
Beckett’s previous fictions, so as to emphasize that “on n’écrit que soimême,” albeit as an other. Additionally, of course, he made use of a string of
homopseudonyms—pseudonyms that are the same or similar to the writer’s
name—in his fictions of the thirties and forties: Sam Beckett in Dream,
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Belacqua Shuah of More Pricks than Kicks (who shares the writer’s initials),
Sam and Hackett in Watt, Lemuel in Malone Dies.
The opening declaration of Malone Dies about approaching death (“I shall
soon be quite dead at last in spite of all. Perhaps next month. Then it will be
the month of April or of May”), Malone’s periodic claims of speaking from
beyond the grave, and his desire to play in the face of death, all chime with
the last years recorded in Renard’s Journal. In the pages covering the final six
months of his life, before his death, as it happens, in the month May of
1910, Renard observes, “La mort peut venir dans une heure ou dans dix
ans” ‘Death may come in an hour or in ten years (23 Nov. 1909), and a few
days later, “A partir d’aujourd’hui, toutes mes pensées ont une teinte de
mort” ‘From today on, all my thoughts are tinged with death’ (27 Nov.
1909).
Let’s take each of these echoes in turn: first, the near-death and
postmortem existence of writer and writing. Both writers draw attention to
the difficulty of distinguishing a living from a spectral being. Accordingly,
Renard queries in his Journal: “Nous sommes peut-être déjà morts trois ou
quatre fois” ‘We’ve perhaps already died three or four times’ (19 Sept.
1904); and “Au fait, est-ce que nous ne sommes pas tous morts, sans nous en
apercevoir?” ‘In fact, aren’t we all dead without being aware of it? (12 Dec.
1905). Near-death is emphasized by Malone’s portrayal of his stories: “they
will be almost lifeless, like the teller” (180) and his equivocation, akin to
Renard’s, about life and death: “à se demander si l’on n’est par mort à son
insu ou né à nouveau quelque part” (97), which in the English version is
sardonically expanded into, “till you begin to wonder if you have not died
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without knowing and gone to hell or been born again into an even worse
place than before” (227).7 Near the end of the novel, Malone conceives of
himself as simultaneously being born and dying: “I am being given [. . .]
birth to into death,” he declares (283), as he imagines himself enwombed
and entombed in a ghostly space. This spacelessness and timelessness, which
is haunted by Hindu and Buddhist texts via Schopenhauer, corresponds to
the abstract womblike tomb and tomblike womb that Beckett’s writing
surrogates have inhabited at one point or another, and which was identified
by Blanchot, as we have seen, with the timeless domain in which writers
must die a death without end.
Second echo: journal writing and playing with death. If critics have found
that Beckett in Malone Dies assaults the conventions of diary writing, thereby
foregrounding writing as writing,8 then surely Renard is one of the
predecessors who showed the way. Both authors, moreover, are intent on
underscoring the ludic elements of writing in their notebooks as the end
nears. Three months before his death, Renard notes in his Journal: “Vivre en
s’amusant avec la mort” ‘Live while having fun [playing] with death’ (23
Feb. 1910), corresponding to Malone’s decision to play as best he can as
death nears: “I shall play a great part of the time, from now on, the greatest
part, if I can” (180). Malone’s game is to make himself and his possessions
appear and disappear by means of the stories he writes into his notebookdiary. This game of come and go, famously described in Freud’s Beyond the
Pleasure Principle and repeated in one form or another in Beckett’s texts, is a
playing with being there and not, presence and absence, life and death. In
another instance of Renard’s “on n’écrit que soi-même” and the Freudian to
and fro, Malone writes about his character Sapo: “What tedium. And I call
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that playing. I wonder if I am not talking yet again about myself. Shall I be
incapable to the end, of lying on any other subject?” (189).
Malone Dies focuses throughout on the life and death impulses that even as
they are sublimated in writing remain active within it. In this game, death
has come to have the upper hand, as putting to death, fictional and not, is
reenacted throughout the text, counterpointed by Eros and allusions to birth
and rebirth, but only sparingly and ironically. Some forty years earlier,
Renard announced the overpowering of the ludic impulse by the fatal effect
of writing his journal: “Ce Journal qui me distrait, m’amuse et me stérilise!”
‘This Journal which distracts, amuses, and sterilizes me! (15 June 1897); “Ce
Journal me vide” ‘This Journal drains me’ (1 Jan. 1901); and “Ceci est un
cahier d’avortements” ‘This is a notebook of abortions’ (1 Dec. 1906). For
Malone, his exercise-book is his life (274), with the final pages serving to
write himself and his creatures into death or near-death, as the hands and
tools and playthings of the writer and of his near-death autoscopic shadow
(hallucination)—mutate into instruments of death. Writing has turned
deadly.
Although I have concentrated on the writerly in both Molloy and Malone
Dies, Beckett’s multi-layered texts are to be read simultaneously, as I have
argued elsewhere, on interlocking inner (psychic), outer (social), anagogical
(mythical, otherworldly), and metatextual planes (Moorjani 123-25). The
many more reverberations that such fourfold exegesis leaves to be explored
will have to wait for another occasion. In conclusion, though, I would like to
switch briefly from the metatextual to the social plane. Akin to the many
pages of Renard’s Journal devoted to the social and political dramas of his
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time, the meditation on death in Malone meurt, composed in French in 1948,
implicates, if mutedly, indirectly, the unspeakable horrors of the Second
World War and the Shoah. It is not so much death as the putting to death
that is interrogated, whether in the form of the butchering of farm animals,
the allusions to Christ’s sacrifice, queries about the death of personages
throughout previous fictions, and the massacre of inmates of the institution
in which Malone’s surrogate Macmann is confined. With its guarded high
walls to prevent escapes, its “keepers” perhaps mingling “with the
prisoners!” as Malone was almost going to say (277), and the unjustified
punishments inflicted on the inmates, the description of the institution
bristles with allusions to the camps.
And finally, it is the stories about Sapo and the peasants that most vividly
recall Renard’s quasi-ethnographical sketches of peasant life in his village.
Both writers debunk pastoral traditions from a participating observer point
of view. Commentators are no doubt correct in asserting that this episode is
based on Beckett’s own experience working on farms and vineyards around
Roussillon during the war (Knowlson 337) as well as on conditions in the
Irish countryside (Harrington 161-64). Personal knowledge, however, does
not preclude the haunting of the story by literary specters.9 Although, I have
tried to show that Renard was a welcome ghost in Beckett’s writing rather
than an overpowering influence to resist, I would like to close with Renard’s
own experience with literary spooks. As he ruefully observed: “Chaque fois
que je veux me mettre au travail, je suis dérangé par la littérature”
‘Whenever I want to get down to work, I’m intruded upon by literature’ (20
Dec. 1906).
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I am grateful to Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon, who are working on Beckett's library,
for this information. One of the anonymous referees of this paper graciously confirmed
Beckett’s continued interest in Renard by drawing my attention to a letter in the Barbara
Bray correspondence at Trinity College Dublin. In this letter to Bray, of 1 September 1964,
Beckett mentions, in particular, his admiration for Renard’s diary entry of 16 April 1908:
“Le vol d’un pigeon qui se pose sur une branche trop faible. De l’aile, il aide la branche”
‘The flight of a pigeon landing on a branch too frail. With its wing it buoys up the branch.’
My thanks for this reference.
2 Citations to Renard’s Journal are by date of journal entry. All translations from the French,
with the exception of Beckett’s texts, are my own.
3 The entry into the “Dream” Notebook quoted in Pilling (33) mistakenly has qui instead of
que.
4 Sartre sees Renard “tied down” (ligoté) by the realistic observations that he sought to
translate into short quips. Sartre is here omitting much of the material of the Journal, such as
the author’s ironic self-probings, the witty scenarios he recounts or creates, and his analysis
of writing and the literary field of his time.
5 For a brilliant analysis of Beckett’s evolution away from the self-destructing language of
the forties, see Locatelli.
6 Freud’s 1910 article is entitled “A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men.” It
appears in vol. 11 of The Standard Edition (London: Hogarth, 1957), 163-76.
7 Page numbers for Malone Dies refer to the Three Novels edition. It is only in the interest of
economy that I am quoting mostly from the English versions of Molloy and Malone meurt.
8 On Malone Dies and the undoing of the conventions of diary writing, see the last chapter of
H. Porter Abbott’s Diary Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984), qtd. in Begam 210, n. 4. For a
fascinating reading of Malone Dies drawing on poststructuralist theories of the death of the
author, see Begam 120-48.
9 Details, moreover, connect Renard’s fictionalized peasant families and Beckett’s. For
instance, the father of the Louis/Lambert family “était réputé bon saigneur et dépeceur de
porcs” ‘was highly thought of as a bleeder and disjointer of pigs’ (Malone 46, Three 199-200);
Renard’s Philippe is similarly “renommé pour son adresse à égorger les porcs” ‘famous for
his pig butchering skills’ (Ragotte 347). Both authors linger over descriptions of animal death
at the hands of humans, with Renard devoting an entire chapter of one of his fictions of
peasant life to the butchering of a pig (Vigneron ch. 3). And the affectionate color names the
Louis/Lamberts give their goats--Grisette/Whitey and Noiraud/Blackey (75, 215)--echo
the bovine names, such as Jaunette (Yellowy) in Renard’s peasant fictions (Ragotte 331).
1
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