MINGLED FLESH

ULRIKA MAUDE

All Strange Away, Imagination Dead Imagine, Ping, and The Lost Ones figure among the shorter prose fictions Samuel Beckett wrote in the 1960s. Critics have tended to approach this group of texts, which are linked not only in imagery but also through their textual genetics, as allegories of the human condition or as parables of the authorial process. Closer scrutiny of these works reveals that the prose fragments engage in a probing examination of the contradictory nature of perception and the embodied state of subjectivity. Through a systematic set of negations, marked by the abandonment of the first-person narrator, the privileging of gesture and posture over language and hearing and, most prominently, the prioritising of the sense of touch over that of vision, these works question and undermine the primacy of the conceptual order, foregrounding exteriority and surface over interiority and depth. The narrating voice itself, through its application of conflicting and ultimately self-negating registers, becomes the locus merely of further doubt and uncertainty. The same can even be said of the persistently failing mathematics of the narrator. In short, the systematic interrogations and negations in the texts set into motion a vacillating dynamic between subjectivity and its dissolution.

During the 1960s, Samuel Beckett wrote a series of shorter prose fictions that have acquired an enigmatic place in their author’s canon. The series begins with All Strange Away, which dates from 1963-1964, and Imagination Dead Imagine, which appeared a year later in 1965; continues with Ping,which appeared in 1966, and concludes with The Lost Ones, a novella which has appeared in three different English language versions, the first of which dates from 1971.1 These short prose works are closely linked with one another, if

1 Le Dépeupleur, the French version of the novella, was famously abandoned by Beckett in 1966, published in fragments, then subsequently unabandoned and completed in 1970, when Beckett added a final fifteenth section to the fourteen preceding ones. The novella was first translated into English in 1971 and exists, at present, in three different English language versions: the original and identical British and American editions, both published in 1972 by John Calder and Grove Press respectively; a version published in issue 96 of the Evergreen Review in 92 Maude not intertwined, not only because all four share similar imagery of bodies in austere spaces, geometrical descriptions and fluctuating light, but also because they share a common genetic. Imagination Dead Imagine is, as Stan Gontarski has called it, an “evolutionary descendant” of All Strange Away, and Bing (the French version of Ping), as Beckett himself said, “may be regarded as the result or miniaturisation of ‘Le Dépeupleur’ abandoned because of its intractable complexities.”2 As Leslie Hill observes, “plott[ing] from the working drafts of Bing”:3

[...] it appears as though Bing began as a gloss on Le Dépeupleur as well as, to some extent, a part of it. In the initial versions, therefore, Bing seems to be devoted to exploring or detailing what it might be possible to say about a body's life in the niches described in Le Dépeupleur. 4

The Lost Ones, which is the longest of the group of texts that have often been referred to as Beckett’s prose fragments, describes the life, in a cylinder, of “two hundred bodies in all round numbers” (204). The bodies are divided into four groups, according to their activity and motility: those who are constantly searching; “those who sometimes pause” (204); the sedentary searchers who rarely move and finally the vanquished, who appear motionless. All Strange Away, Imagination Dead Imagine and Ping are similar, but in them, individual bodies rather than a community become the focus of the narrator’s attention. What has most puzzled critics about these works is the peculiarity of their setting and subject matter, together with the oddity of their linguistic register. In the case of The Lost Ones, which to date has received the most critical attention, the abundance of measurement and precise numerical

1973, which for its part was published as a Dell paperback in the same year, and finally the most recent version, published in Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove Press, 1995), which contains features of both of the previous English language versions. See S. E. Gontarski, “Refiguring, Revising, and Reprinting The Lost Ones,” Journal of Beckett Studies 4, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 99-101. All references in the text to Beckett are from Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989, unless otherwise stated. 2 Gontarski’s comment is from his introduction to Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989, xv. The quotation is from Beckett’s personal notebooks which also contain the manuscripts of the two texts, reprinted in Richard Admussen, The Samuel Beckett Manuscripts: A Study (Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1979), 22. 3 Leslie Hill, Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 149. 4 Ibid., 150.