“Bent like a lover’s memory, like certain old gravestones bent. In that old graveyard. Names worn away and when was what time.”
Once you become entangled in Samuel Beckett’s writing, you remain entangled—always. His late works—Company (1980), Ill Seen Ill Said (1981), and Worstward Ho (1983)—are sometimes referred to as “novels,” although it may be more accurate to regard them as short prose pieces. Ill Seen Ill Said, for example, is about eight thousand words long—eight thousand, not eighty thousand. Not what we usually expect of a “novel.” And yet these works are unimaginably expansive. They possess a singular beauty and a quality that seeps into the mind and stays there. A unique, almost “ghostly” quality. Their appeal lies in offering a dynamic and fresh experience of reading fiction. They draw the reader into a curious game—a game about approaching the end of life (how entertaining!), a game about recognizing death, a place where death, in every sense, is not far away at all, merely just beyond a thin veil.
Well, we are already entangled in this question. “Our little life is rounded with a sleep,” Shakespeare put it with great concision. And what an inspiring line it is, combining the finite and infinite dimensions of life with such a tender regard for humanity. One senses that Samuel Beckett is not far removed from this humanistic outlook.
In his late pieces, Beckett creates a kind of prism through which the light of human existence can be perceived. As you read, it is as if you inhabit the text. To read these works properly, in my view, one must read freely—there is no other way. Of course, once again, the world is free: read and interpret them however you wish. Many critics, however, interpret them in highly specific and idiosyncratic ways, writing about them in an effort to convince us—the readers—that their way is the only correct one.
That is one kind of criticism: the closing down of free play. The woman—Beckett’s mother—was May. Perhaps she is, in one sense, present here—if one adopts a biographical approach to reading. Beckett once said, “There is no symbol where none is intended. I shall try to avoid the trap.” But it was Sartre, I think, who wrote that we (human beings) are condemned to freedom: “Because man, once thrown into the world, is responsible for everything he does.” The phrasing is somewhat gendered, but if we include women and others, it remains largely true.
Let us pause for a moment and look at the opening quotation of Ill Seen Ill Said. Notice one clear ambiguity among many. First, consider this sentence: “Bent like a lover’s memory, certain old gravestones bent.” One might initially read it as someone bending, and therefore being bent—in a sense (by inserting an imaginary comma between “memory” and “certain”) this would mean something like: someone stands, bent in a lover’s memory (perhaps of a lost beloved). Like the epitaph on Yeats’s gravestone: “Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by.” Beckett’s gravestone inscriptions reduce the spans of life to pronouns such as “how long.” Finite stretches of time are not recorded within infinite time. And this is not exactly a “person”—I misspoke—but rather a literary character to whom I, as a reader, give certain qualities of life. More a figment, really.
Does Beckett anticipate the image of the reader? Certainly. Or rather, he creates a space in which the reader appears and reflects. All of us have lost someone dear, or will do so. Perhaps we are condemned to freedom, as Sartre wrote, but we are also condemned to suffering.
Grammatically, however, it may be that the gravestones themselves are bent—or at least some of them. That is, some of them are bent, as gravestones typically become over time in old graveyards. And notice, too, that these gravestones may be “bent in a lover’s memory,” in the sense that some of them were originally placed with love and reverence to commemorate the one buried beneath them. Sooner or later, most of us will have to visit a graveyard—unless, unfortunately, we are already there, or perhaps cremated, or lying unmarked in some unknown place.
Alternatively, in this passage the gravestones themselves may be bent, with the same imagined comma, but with the sense of agency transferred to the gravestones. This would be something like: these old gravestones are bent (are bending, if our reading brings us into the present, which is likely where it truly belongs) in a lover’s memory of the deceased beneath them. Decades after burial, the gravestones have bent. All right, I have ruined the poetry—but you see what this alternative sense might be. We could continue. This is a critical point in my reading of this “novel” (which might also be described as a screenplay, a lengthy set of stage directions for what the reader is to imagine).
A beautiful and mysterious sense of wonder accompanies the reading of Ill Seen Ill Said. No matter how often you read it, you can never skim it. Some commentators believe that the old woman, the central figure of the story, is approaching death; others believe she is already dead, like a ghost. I prefer to imagine her with precisely the vitality that a reader brings to the text when encountering it. Or perhaps it is better to think of her as both alive and dead, reduced to infinity in Shakespeare’s “little life.” But we must be “careful,” as the narrative voice sometimes seems to warn itself—or the reader—not to misread a feeling or to fix one possibility at the expense of others. Every sentence is a challenge. We cannot allow critics to tell us what it means. They are often deluded.
Do you know how, when you are “reading” a novel, you sometimes look up and say, “Where was I—what did all that mean?” You have merely skimmed it, taken in the words, but not properly processed them. This feeling is almost inevitable when reading Ill Seen Ill Said (or Company or Worstward Ho). At least part of the reason is that every sentence is saturated with ambiguity, or the overall context infuses everything with it. Let us look at a few relatively simple examples from this text:
“In the dark day and night.” It is quite clear that the absence of a comma produces at least two distinct meanings. Either the speaker or subject (an “other,” or a place) is “in the dark” both day and night; or “dark” qualifies “day,” or “day and night” together.
Or this phrase: “A gap that time will fill.”
Consider the temporal or spatial possibilities of the word “gap.” And in what sense might “time” fill something? How can a gap, so to speak, be created and then filled by time?
Or this one: “This too still dead.” “Still,” or “still dead,” perhaps suggests answering a familiar person’s question about your mother—“How is your mother?”—with: “Still dead.”
Let us consider the scenario more broadly. The white-haired old woman lives in a cabin near an area of white stones. There are twelve of them, evoking a cosmic scene, or perhaps a graveyard, or a combination that ultimately defies definition. She is being watched—by the narrator, by the reader, by the all-pervasive “eye” (as in, for example, “the eye loses itself in the dark”). She is watched by this frightening “eye,” a presence not limited to Ill Seen Ill Said but found in other short works by Beckett as well (and especially in the film Film).
It is as if the woman’s (objective) character is constantly engaged in her movements and activities, while the “eye” (subjective) only occasionally “enters” or “connects,” seeing her at this moment or that. Much as we, as readers, activate a text and choose to inhabit it at any moment we wish—an autonomous entity, constantly in motion.