Samuel Beckett. Eugene Webb
moving from place to place. This is in spite of physical impairments that also link him with other Beckett characters: ‘Belacqua had a spavined gait, his feet were in ruins . . .’ (p. 10). Belacqua likes to think that it is by choice that he keeps constantly moving. In the later novels, Beckett’s characters gradually come to realize that they are forced to keep going by a mysterious inner compulsion. For all of Belcqua’s belief in his own freedom, the same compulsion seems to be at work in his case too:
My sometime friend Belacqua enlivened the last phase of his solipsism, before he toed the line and began to relish the world, with the belief that the best thing he had to do was to move constantly from place to place. He did not know how this conclusion had been gained, but that it was not thanks to his preferring one place to another he felt sure. He was pleased to think he could give what he called the Furies the slip by merely setting himself in motion [p. 43].
In Beckett’s world, nobody ever becomes free for long from ‘the Furies.’ All of his principal characters are driven more or less constantly to keep moving, talking, writing, or thinking. There can be no freedom, no enduring rest. Nor does it matter much where they go or what they do. More often than not they move in circles. If they move in space like Belacqua, they tend to return to the places from which they started: ‘The simplest form of this exercise was boomerang, out and back’ (More Pricks, p. 44). If they are sitting and thinking, as the Unnamable seems to be, they tend to keep repeating patterns of thought that they have already exhausted and repudiated. This is what makes time seem cyclical and inexorable in Beckett’s world. Time is the measure of movement, whether physical movement or the movement of thoughts. In the world of Beckett’s novels, movement is the basic irresistible reality of life, and this movement tends infernally to repeat the same patterns over and over.
Belacqua does not really understand all this very clearly, but he does have some sense of the constant movement of time and of the boring circularity of its patterns, and at times his sense of this becomes acute and anguished. In the story, ‘Ding Dong,’ during one of his ‘moving pauses,’ as he calls his walks, he stops in a pub for a while to ‘wait for a sign’ before continuing. The sign, when it comes, is not only disappointing but deeply disturbing: an old woman comes along selling ‘seats in heaven, tuppence each.’ This would sound like a way out of the cycles of time, but the woman goes on to say that ‘heaven goes round . . . and round and round and round and round and round’ (p. 56). As she whirls her arms to illustrate the idea, her speech accelerates with a dizzying effect: ‘ “Rowan” she said, dropping the d’s and getting more of a spin into the slogan, “rowan an’ rowan an’ rowan”.’ Finally Belacqua breaks out into ‘a beastly sweat.’ There is no escape from time and movement, not even, as Schopenhauer would have believed, in the supposedly timeless heaven of aesthetic contemplation; the spectator in the theater gallery, ‘heaven,’ is no freer than the actors he watches or the characters they act. As though symbolically capitulating to the inexorable fate the old woman personifies, Belacqua allows her to coerce him into buying four tickets he does not want, ‘fer yer friend, yer da, yer ma an’ yer motte,’ not even one for himself.
In the next story, ‘A Wet Night,’ Belacqua receives a similar revelation from an advertising sign. It is the Christmas season, and Belacqua is walking along a street on which many displays celebrate Christ’s nativity. A Bovril sign shows a series of changing pictures representing the Annunciation. The Annunciation itself, which in the Christian tradition is supposed to represent the manifestation of the purpose of time and a revitalization of the world, here seems empty, tawdry, and tired: ‘The lemon of faith jaundiced, annunciating the series, was in a fungus of hopeless green reduced to shingles and abolished’ (p. 61). At the end of its hopeless message the sign, like time itself, begins all over again ‘da capo.’
Immersed in a meaningless world and driven to the point of exhaustion by irrational needs to keep moving and thinking in spite of his natural indolence, Belacqua naturally thinks at times of escape, especially in his younger years. During the walk in the Fingal countryside with Winnie, he tells her how he would like to be back in the womb, ‘in the caul, on my back in the dark for ever’ (p. 32). He also seems, like Murphy later, to think of insanity as a possible means of escape: when he and Winnie see the Portrane Lunatic Asylum in the distance, he tells her, ‘my heart’s right there’ (p. 27). In ‘Love and Lethe,’ he sets out with another girl friend, Ruby Tough, to commit a double suicide. Neither is able to go through with it, though. In the process of getting their paraphernalia ready—veronal, a gun, a suicide note reading ‘temporarily sane’ on an old automobile licence plate—they end up copulating instead.
Later as he gets older and death becomes a more imminent possibility, Belacqua becomes increasingly reluctant to let go of the life that oppresses him. In its cyclical character, time, eternally repetitious, is overpoweringly boring, and for this reason it drives one to want to escape from consciousness into death, unconsciousness, or madness. But time, in Beckett’s works, is not only cyclical, it is also linear. Though a person’s life is filled with repeated patterns of frustration and futility, time is always carrying one through steadily increasing physical debility toward death, and as death draws closer, it becomes frightening.
Many of the characters in More Pricks than Kicks are disturbed by the passage of time and the approach of death. Ruby Tough is dying of an incurable disease. The Smeraldina has ‘some dam thing’ on her leg, ‘full of matter.’ Signorina Ottolenghi, Belacqua’s beautiful and elegant Italian teacher in ‘Dante and the Lobster,’ is past the bloom of her youth, and although she ‘had found being young and beautiful and pure more of a bore than anything else’ (p. 15), her regret at aging can be seen in the tone of her references to passing time: ‘ “That used to be” her past tenses were always sorrowful “a favourite question.” ’ The inevitable decay of life in time presses upon the whole world of this book, as it does in all of Beckett’s works. Balacqua notices on one of his walks the motto of the college in Pearse Street: ‘Perpetuis futuris temporibus duraturum’ (‘It will last into endless future times’; p. 49). It is ‘to be hoped so indeed,’ thinks Belacqua of this quixotic hope for permanence. In the world these books present to us, all of life—people, institutions, everything—is under sentence of decay and death; only the patterns they live through are permanent.
Much as Belacqua would like to escape, the fear of death binds him to life. As we have seen, his one serious attempt to commit suicide collapses in copulation, which is especially ironic since this is one of the elements of life that he particularly shuns when he can. At times he even seizes on pain in order to intensify his sense of existing. In ‘A Wet Night,’ he deliberately squeezes a large anthrax that is growing on his neck because the pangs are ‘a guarantee of identity’ (p. 95). Years later when he is about to be operated on for the same anthrax in the story, ‘Yellow,’ he is terrified that he may die. The title of the story was probably taken in part from the color of ‘the grand old yaller wall’ (p. 242) as the sun shines on it. The sunlight on the wall looks to Belacqua like a clock marking the minutes that lead so inexorably toward the operation. As he watches it and waits, he curses ‘this dribble of time,’ which he likens to sanies dripping into a bucket. ‘The world wants a new washer,’ he thinks and resolves to draw the blinds. But time cannot be stopped. Before he can carry out his resolve, a nurse comes in and prepares him for the operation, during which he is to die of an overdose of anaesthetic. Some years earlier when he was marrying his second wife, Thelma, he was given a clock for a wedding present. It horrified him:
He who of late years and with the approval of Lucy would not tolerate a chronometer of any kind in the house, for whom the local publication of the hours was six of the best on the brain every hour, and even the sun’s shadow a torment, now to have this time-fuse deafen the rest of his days [p. 183].
To avoid being constantly reminded by it that the time-fuse would eventually explode in his death, he decided to turn its ‘death’s head’ to the wall. But he could no more escape time then by that means than he can now by drawing the blinds. Both the hands of the clock going around and around and the sun going around in the heavens symbolize the inexorable linear movement of time toward decay and death and the inevitable circularity of time’s patterns.
One of Belacqua’s principal literary interests