DIVINE INTERTEXTUALITY: Samuel Beckett, Company, Le Depeup/eur

Joseph Long

"Hope deferred", said Vladimir in Waiting for Godot, "maketh the something sick, who said that?" In Beckett's universe, the voice of the Prophet is silent and language itself carries the remnants of a broken and forgotten Order. Two late texts, Le Dipeup/eur (1970), written in French, and Company (1980), written in English, illustrate in their similarities and in their divergences the discursive presence of voices which cannot be stilled.

Poetry, according to Robert Frost, is "what gets lost in translation". It was, in a sense, to reap the benefit of such loss that Beckett, for the greater part of his prose work, abandoned the English language - "because", as he had declared to Richard Coe, "you can't help writing poetry in it."l French, as an acquired language, provided him with the "necessary weakening effect" and corresponded to the aesthetic of reduction which he saw as marking his writing off from that of James Joyce:

I realised that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one's material. He was always adding to it; you have only to look at his proofs to see that. I realised that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding. 2

The abandonment of the English language is dramatically and precisely recorded in James Knowlson's authorised biography. In February 1946, Beckett was working on the manuscript of a prose text which was first published under the title "Suite", later "La Fin". The first 29 pages are written in English. Then, "in mid-March [Beckett] drew a line a third of the way down the page and wrote the remainder of the story in French.,,3 The change to French appears to have helped expedite the writing, and by the end of May, Beckett was able to announce to George Reavey that he had finished his "French story, about 45000 words I think". This marked the beginning, says Knowlson, of "an extraordinarily fertile period during which he produced four stories, four novels and two plays, all written in French [ ... ]: a 'frenzy of writing' as Beckett himself described it".

145 There was nothing capricious, then, about the choice of language. Beckett chose French and stuck with it for thirty years. The vision of Beckett moving indifferently from one language to the other is based on misunderstanding. It may apply, to some extent, to the dramatic writings, where the circumstances of production led him, on occasion, to adopting English as the primary language. In 1956, for example, All That Fall was written in English as a radio play for the BBC and, in 1958, Krapp's Last Tape was written for the actor Patrick Magee, and produced at the Royal Court Theatre, London. But with the prose texts, where the choice was free, Beckett wrote consistently, almost invariably, in French. Besides, in the task of self-translation from either language, he regularly imprecates against the frustrations of the enterprise. The late text Company, published in 1980, occupies therefore a truly special position in Beckett's prose work. For the first time in over thirty years, Beckett reverted to English as the primary language of prose writing. But Company has other claims to special attention. It is, of all Beckett's writing, the text which seems to offer the most telling glimpses of the author's personal life experiences. It does so, to the point that H. Porter Abbott has speculated that the writing of Company, begun in 1977, may be something of a defensive reaction provoked by the imminence, at that time, of Deirdre Bair's biography - a narrative presenting itself as the story of Samuel Beckett's life and, notoriously, the source of strong disquiet on Beckett's part.4 Be that as it may, in Company, a new form of narrative writing is elaborated, a paradoxical form which at one and the same time yields the intimacy of private moments while proclaiming the impossibility of writing the self. 5 That unique and paradoxical form is sustained by a binary discursive structure. Two voices are opposed. On the one hand, there is a voice speaking in the second person singular, you, addressing an impassive Hearer, "one on his back in the dark," and articulating snatches of a past: "You are an old man plodding along a narrow country road," or again: "A small boy you come out of Connolly's store holding your mother by the hand.,,6 That is the imbedded voice, the secondary narrative instance. The primary narrative instance is represented by a voice speaking in the third person and articulating, not past experience and the process of memory, but the present moment, the "here and now" of utterance and the process of enunciation: "A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine." The primary voice occupies forty-three of the fifty-eight paragraphs which make up the text. It examines and speculates upon the physical conditions and circumstances of utterance - the nature of the dark, for example, in which

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