james olney: memory and narrative.pdf

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Memory and the Narrative Imperative: St. Augustine and Samuel BeckettAuthor(s): James OlneyReviewed work(s):Source: New Literary History, Vol. 24, No. 4, Papers from the Commonwealth Center forLiterary and Cultural Change (Autumn, 1993), pp. 857-880Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/469398 .Accessed: 12/03/2013 06:48

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Memoryand the Narrative

mperative:St. Augustine and Samuel Beckett*

James Olney

Estragon: All the dead voices....Vladimir: They all speak together.Estragon: Each one to itself....Vladimir: What do they ay?

Estragon: They talk about their ives.Vladimir: To have ived s not enough for hem.Estragon: They have to talk about it.'

-" ORD,since eternity s yours, can you be ignorant of what Isay to you?" St. Augustine asks at the outset of book 11 ofthe Confessions;nd being certain that all that takes place in

time is eternally present to the mind of God, Augustine goes on

to ponder the next logical question about the act he has beenengaged in throughout the first en books of the Confessions:Whythen do I put before you in order the stories of so many things?"2We all know the kinds of stories Augustine has been putting beforeGod in order, stories, ike the one of stealing pears, that have littlemoment in themselves but that, echoing events in both the NewTestament and the Old Testament, reverberate n significance farbeyond their apparent triviality. horn of Augustine's theologicalterminology nd the confessional context, this question about nar-

rative motives and intentions s essentially he same question thatthe various narrators of Samuel Beckett's fiction nd the charactersof his drama ask over and over again. What is the impetus, Beckett'smany different personae ask, why the compulsion to begin andrebegin, all over again and incessantly, hese futile tories of futility,in search of something that though it may be desired cannot evenbe named? "And ever murmuring," s the anonymous voice of TheUnnamable uts it, "my old stories, my old story, s if it were thefirst ime."3Augustine's "Why then do I put before you in order

*This essay is a revised version of a paper presented at the Commonwealth Centerseminar "Remembering and Forgetting."

NewLiterary istory, 993, 24: 857-880

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858 NEW LITERARYHISTORY

the stories of so many things?" becomes in Beckett, "Why shouldI try to put in order, time after time, the stories of so few things,my old stories, my old story, as if it were the first ime?" WithBeckett, the impulse to narrate, which could be and was givenrational analysis and logical explanation by Augustine, has becomeirrational nd illogical, compulsive, obsessional, repetitive, nwilledand often unwanted but not to be denied.

The entire ustification, alidation, necessity, nd indeed exemplaryinstance of writing ne's life, of finding the words that signify heself and its history, re offered to us for the first ime (accordingto my narrative) in the Confessions; y the time of Company, hejustification nd validation established by Augustine are long sincevanished and all that remains of the Augustinian egacy, drawn onso many times by so many writers from the fifth o the twentiethcentury, s the necessity f performing he narrative ct withoutfirst person in sight to perform t or to do the remembering hatprecedes, accompanies, and follows the narrating. That necessity,however, has lost nothing of its compulsive force. "Strange notion,"the eponymous narrator of The Unnamable ays, "Strange notion inany case, and eminently open to suspicion, that of a task to beperformed, before one can be at rest. Strange task, which consistsin speaking of oneself" (BT 285). Strange as the task may be,however, the last words of this exercise in life-writing onfirm henecessity f carrying t out. "I don't know," as the narrator says,

I don't know, hat's ll words,never wake, ll words, here's othing lse,you must go on, that's ll I know, hey're oing ostop, know hat well,I can feel it, they're oing to abandon me, it will be the silence, or a

moment, good few moments,r

itwill

be mine, the lasting ne, thatdidn't ast, hat till asts, t will be I, you must go on, I can't go on, youmust go on, I'll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, untilthey find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must goon, perhaps it's done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhapsthey have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door thatopens on my story, hat would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it willbe the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, n the silenceyou don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on. (BT 285)

But let me return to Augustine's Confessions o establish the beginningof the historical, philosophical, psychological process that issuesfinally in Beckett's "I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence youdon't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."

When I say that the justification, validation, and necessity of



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MEMORY AND THE NARRATIVE IMPERATIVE 859

writing ne's life are established n the Confessions, have principallyin mind a passage in book 11 in which Augustine describes whathappens when he recites a psalm that he knows. This absolutelycrucial passage on narrative comes after the equally crucial disqui-sition on memory n book 10 and the twin meditation on time inbook 11, toward the end of which Augustine writes: "It is now,however, perfectly lear that neither the future nor the past are inexistence, nd that t is incorrect o say that there are three times-past, present, and future. Though one might perhaps say: 'Thereare three times a present of things past, a present of things present,and a present of things future.' For these three do exist in themind, and I do not see them anywhere else: the present time ofthings past is memory; the present time of things present is sight;the present time of things future s expectation" CSA 11.20). That"one might perhaps say" that there exists such a temporal hybridas "a present of things past" follows from Augustine's exaltedconception of memory, and it is what grounds his ideas aboutnarrative n general and about life narrative n particular. Suppose,"Augustine says of the narrative ct and the way it realizes itself ntime,

Suppose am about to recite psalmwhich know.Before begin,myexpectation s extended over the whole psalm. But once I have begun,whatever pluckoff from t and let fall nto the past enters he provinceof my memory. o the life of this action of mine is extended n twodirections--toward ymemory, s regardswhat have recited, nd towardmy expectation, s regards what am about to recite. But all the time myattention s present nd through t what was future asseson its way tobecomepast. And as I proceedfurther nd further ithmy recitation, o

the expectation rows horter nd the memory rows onger, ntil ll theexpectation s finished t the point when the whole of this ction s overand has passed nto the memory. nd what s true of the wholepsalm salso true of every art of the psalm nd of every yllable n it. The sameholds good for ny onger ction, f which he psalmmaybe only part.It is true lso of the wholeof a man's ife, f which ll of his actions reparts. CSA11.28)

Augustine conceives of memory according to various formulationsat different

lacesin the

Confessions.ere he

imaginesit as a great

reservoir which provides the matter hat s to be recited or narratedand which receives t back again, but no doubt altered and enrichedby the process of reciting, when the recitation/narration scompleted.Beckett imagines very much the same process, though with tworeservoirs or vessels, when, in his little book on Proust, he writes,



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860 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

"The individual is the seat of a constant process of decantation,decantation from the vessel

containingthe fluid of future

time,sluggish, pale and monochrome, to the vessel containing the fluidof past time, agitated and multicoloured by the phenomena of itshours."4 The process as Augustine, again, describes it is perfectlycircular, and there is a point before recitation begins and after itends when expectation and memory coincide and are identical. Apsalm that one knows and can recite-knows "by heart," s we say-is the object of expectation, but, to be known, t must also be securein memory; ikewise, at the point when the whole of this action is

over and has passed into the memory," t immediately becomesavailable again, as a whole, for re-recitation, nd expectation s thus,once more, "extended over the whole psalm."

It may seem too casually dropped in to bear such significance,but surely the final quoted sentence-"It is true also of the wholeof a man's life, of which all of his actions are parts"--is intendedas justification or the procedure of the entire volume of the Con-fessions. t was not at all obvious to Beckett that the whole of aman's life is narratable as the whole of a psalm is recitable. "[B]ut

an instant, n hour, and so on," the Unnamable wonders, "how canthey be represented, a life, how could that be made clear to me,here, in the dark" (BT 375). But let us consider what the narrativeprocedure is according to the Augustinian passage and what it hasbeen for the first en books of the Confessions.n the moment ofreciting or narrating, xpectation and memory ie on one side andthe other of the present, n one side and the other of the enunciationof syllables, words, sentences, and larger syntactic nits. It is as ifthe elements of narrative pass from expectation, which s allied with

the future (what will be narrated), across the laser beam of thepresent (what is being narrated), to fall again into memory, lliedwith the past (what has beennarrated). But the recitation r narrativeonce over, there s a merger of expectation nd memory r a reversalof the two so that what fell nto memory s now there n expectationfor another act of recitation/narration. nd Augustine clearly tatesthat the whole of a man's life may be held in this reservoir hat ismemory/expectation nd will there be available for recitation ndre-recitation, or narrating nd re-narrating, s that which is to be

narrated s drawn from he future o pass across the beam of presentnarrating thence to fall into the reservoir of that which has beennarrated . . . which will once again present itself for narrating asthat which is now in the past as memory shows its other face asthat which exists in the future as expectation. But all of this, we



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should remember, ike all of Beckett's late narratives, akes place

in the mind, and we should be careful not to speak, as I have justdone, of past and future but rather of "a present of things past, apresent of things present, and a present of things future." TheAugustinian ct of remembering nd narrating s figured n Companyin only slightly ltered terminology when we are told that there is"no tense in the dark in that dim mind. All at once over and intrain and to come."' The "dim mind" of Company s the twentieth-century version of the Augustinian mind where all takes place,where past, present, and future exist as the present of time past,

the present of time present, and the present of time future; andin that dim mind, too, occurs the Augustinian act of narration orrecitation where all is held in expectation, hen in recitation, inallyin memory.

This whole process figures n Augustine's text frequently s pairsof verbs--recordor t confiteor, ecolo t narro--as f they were boundeach to each by an internal, unbreakable bond of identicalness:remember-and-confess, ecall-and-narrate, recollect-and-tell. Thepaired verbs serve to suggest a reverse mirror ikeness in the two

activities; r perhaps one might better say that the verbs suggest asingle activity f dual dynamic, ecalling story ackward and tellingit forward. "A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine" (C 7). Sobegins the Beckettian process of remembering-and-narrating n Com-pany, n some ways strikingly ike the process described in book 11of Augustine's Confessions nd in other ways, of course, strikinglyunlike that process both as described in book 11 and as it is realizedin the first nine books of the Confessions. To one on his back inthe dark," the narrative of Company ontinues. "Only a small partof what is said can be verified. As for example when he hears, Youare on your back in the dark. Then he must acknowledge the truthof what is said. But by far the greater part of what is said cannotbe verified" C 7). Why is it that most of what the voice says to theone in the dark is unverifiable? resumably because it comes as thevoice of memory, peaking of past events that cannot certainly beconnected with present being. Memory, if it is truly memory ac-cording to the Augustinian understanding, hould be the guarantorof identity nd continuity f being across time, the only liaison-

but an unbroken and fully capable liaison all the same-betweenpast experience and present consciousness. Thus the claim thatAugustine makes for memory, claim that Company alls radicallyinto doubt: "by far the greater part of what s said cannot be verified.As for example when he hears, You first aw the light on such and



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such a day. Sometimes the two are combined as for example, Youfirst aw the light on such and such a day and now you are onyour back in the dark. A device perhaps from the incontrovertibilityof the one to win credence for the other. That then s the proposition.To one on his back in the dark a voice tells of a past. With occasionalallusion to a present and more rarely to a future" C 7-8). WereAugustine the one on his back in the dark, he would not admitthat what the voice says to him cannot be verified; on the contrary,he feels himself ully resent to himself n an irrefragable ontinuity,and the past of which the voice tells would be verifiable perhaps"ratifiable" would be a more precisely ppropriate term) by his fullapprehension of "a present of things past, a present f things resent,and a present of things future."

It is ingenious of the Beckettian oice that, n this arliest referenceto events past, it should choose that event that, it is said, no oneis able to remember, that is, the event of birth ironically nough,Beckett implies several times that he remembers being born, or ifnot Beckett then fictional haracters who clearly stand in for himclaim to remember their birth). Autobiographers and other life-narrators, f course, frequently egin with this unremembered ex-perience: "I was born on such and such a date in such and sucha place.

...."6 What the narrative of Company ucceeds in doing by

beginning with this absolutely unverifiable vent is not only to castgreat doubt on everything lse the voice tells of a past but to renderimpossible the assertion of "I" in the recalling of these unrecallableevents. f you cannot say "born on such and such a day," you cannotsay "I" either: f you cannot remember he event, you cannot narrateout of the continuity f being that I" implies. Augustine gets aroundthis as best he can by

writing,not of his birth to be sure but of

his early infancy, Then all I knew was how to suck, to be contentwith bodily pleasure, and to be discontented with bodily pain; thatwas all. Afterward began to smile; first when I was asleep andlater when awake. So, at least, I have been told and I can easilybelieve it, since we see the same thing n other babies. I cannot ofcourse remember what happened in my own case" (CSA 1.6). The"I" can perfectly well hold here because it is to later, verifiableexperience that Augustine appeals for his account of these unver-ifiable events of his own past-"A device," the narrator of

Company,who sees through this sort of thing, says, "perhaps from the in-controvertibility f the one to win credence for the other." Here isthe "device" as Augustine employs t: "This, I have learned, is whatbabies are like, so far as I have been able to observe them; andthey n their ignorance have shown me that I myself was like this



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better than my nurses who knew what I was" (CSA 1.6). It mustbe acknowledged, however, that "by far the greater part of what issaid"-by the voice, by Augustine, by any life narrator-"cannot beverified." Ratified t may be, perhaps, but not verified.

Even ratification, however, which would require saying "I re-member," hus implying belief in the continuity f being coveredby the use of "I" and a belief also in the capacity of memory tosustain this continuity f being, seems impossible in Company, orthe one lying (and the reader can never be free of the doublemeaning of "lying") on his back in the dark "cannot but sometimeswonder if it is indeed to and of him the voice is speaking" (C 9).Is the past that the voice tells of the past of the one lying in thedark? Are these his memories or someone else's memories? Wenever know. What ecstasy t would be--"What an addition to companythat would be "-we are told in Company, f he to whom the voicespeaks were one day able to say, "Yes I remember. That was I.That was I then" (C 27). But Beckett, or his creature, a "deviseddeviser devising t all for company" (C 64), will not permit this easyresolution, his easy claim of remembering nd of a secure identity.What makes all this so anguishing s that n any piece of life writingof the type of the Confessionsnd Companyand I maintain that theyare of the same type) reference-to take up the prickly uestion ofreferentiality hat properly troubles critics f this kind of writing-is never to events of the past but to memories of those events. "Thepresent of things past is memory," s Augustine says, but how arewe situated if memory s so uncertain or unstable, both epistemo-logically nd ontologically, hat we do not even know if a given setof memories s ours or someone else's? To think of autobiography'sreferentiality s pertaining not to events of the past but to memoriesof those events solves a lot of problems arising in a good manytexts, but Beckett, ike other writers of our time, has altered theterms and raised the stakes of the wager by calling into doubt, inthe most radical way, memory's capacity to establish a relationshipto our past and hence a relationship o ourselves grown out of thepast.

The Confessions nd Company re alike in that they are bothnarratives bout the act of remembering nd they re also narrativesabout the act of

narrating. Augustine,like Beckett, tells the

storyof himself telling the story of himself telling the story of his life.For the process of remembering-and-narrating s Augustine de-scribes t in the passage I have quoted on reciting psalm there isa perfect modern analogy not available to Augustine in his timebut made full use of by Beckett: the tape recorder and player, an



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analogy which becomes the literal vehicle of Beckett's Krapp's LastTape. In that short play Krapp, "a wearish old man" of sixty-nine,

listens to a tape that he made on his thirty-ninth irthday "Thirty-nine today, sound as a bell, apart from my old weakness, andintellectually I have now every reason to suspect at the . . . (hesitates)... crest of the wave-or thereabouts."')-a tape that he preparedto make thirty ears earlier by listening rather mockingly, s he islistening now, to a tape made in a yet earlier year. "Just beenlistening o an old year," the thirty-nine-year-old oice on the tapesays to the "wearish old man," "passages at random. I did not checkin the book, but it must be at least ten or twelve years ago" (K

218). Each time that he prepares, at age twenty-seven r twenty-nine, thirty-nine, nd now at sixty-nine and there appear to bemany more tapes in between since the tape made at thirty-nine sspool five from box three), to reflect ack on the previous year andprevious years, Krapp, in order to assist himself n extending ex-pectation over the whole of his life, istens to the narrated episodesof his life pass from the spool of expectation on the left across thehead of the tape player, which corresponds to the present of nar-ration, to be taken up by the spool of memory on the right-which,

when rewound, becomes once again the spool of expectation. Theanalogy to the Augustinian recitation f a psalm-"true also of thewhole of a man's life"--is quite exact.

What the sixty-nine-year-old rapp hears on the tape made byhis thirty-nine-year-old ncarnation and his latter-day eaction to itare also, mutatis mutandis, rather Augustinian: "Just been listeningto an old year, passages at random. . . . These old P. M.s aregruesome, but I often find them-(Krapp switches ff, roods, witcheson)-a help before embarking on a new ... (hesitates).. retrospect.Hard to believe I was ever that young whelp. The voice JesusAnd the aspirations (Brief augh in which Krapp oins.) And theresolutions (Brief laugh in which Krapp oins.) To drink less, inparticular. Brief augh of Krapp alone)" (K 218). Is not the laughterof the two Krapps at the very young Krapp, succeeded by the "brieflaugh of Krapp alone" at both of the earlier Krapps, rather similarto this celebrated passage on chastity n the Confessions?But I, amost wretched youth, most wretched from the very start of myyouth, had even sought chastity rom you, and had said, 'Give me

chastity nd continence, but not yet ' For I feared that you wouldhear me quickly" (CSA 8.7). Whether or not one hears the samekind of mocking aughter in these two passages, there can be littlequestion about the similarity n retrospective reflection ast backover retrospective reflection. For Beckett's character as for theAugustinian confessant, he making of earlier tapes of recollection



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or the recall of earlier acts of retrospection re made a part of thetwin acts of memory nd narration n the present, o that memorial

acts surround earlier memorial cts which urround earlier memorialacts which . . as far back as memory reaches. Is this not the natureof the autobiographical act as established by Augustine in the Con-fessions nd as practised by Beckett in his late fictions-cum-dramas-cum-life-writings-a perpetually renewed attempt to find languageadequate to rendering the self and its experience, an attempt thatincludes within tself ll earlier attempts nd that draws up behindit all these earlier attempts n this latest quest? At the beginning ofThe Unnamable he narrator imagines that all of Beckett's earlier

creations and projections--Murphy, Molloy, Moran, Malone, Mac-mann, and so on-are present in and for this summary narrative:"To tell the truth," he says, "I believe they are all here, at leastfrom Murphy on, I believe we are all here . . ." (BT 268). And wemust suppose that for both of them, the Augustinian protagonistand the Beckettian one, the dramatized confessant nd the dramaticcharacter, the act of remembering-and-narrating, f recalling-and-confessing, will go on as long as life continues. As Krapp puts it:"Ah finish your booze now and get to your bed. Go on with this

drivel in the morning. Or leave it at that. Pause.) Leave it at that.(Pause.) Lie propped up in the dark-and wander. Be again in thedingle on a Christmas Eve, gathering holly, he red-berried. Pause.)Be again on Croghan on a Sunday morning, n the haze, with thebitch, stop and listen to the bells. (Pause.) And so on. (Pause.) Beagain, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. Pause.) Once wasn'tenough for you" (K 223). So it s that Estragon responds to Vladimir'sobservation that "to have lived is not enough for them" with "Theyhave to talk about it": to live a life s not enough; it must be narrated,

even compulsively, bsessively narrated: "Once wasn't enough foryou."The narrative mperative cross the centuries eems clear enough.

There remains the question of how a life s to be narrated. Augustine,we recall, speaks of telling "in order [ex ordine] he stories of somany things." What is this order for Augustine's stories and howis it established? He repeats the phrase at the beginning of chapter2 of book 11:

But my pen's tongue will never have strength o declare all your ex-hortations nd your terrors, he consolations nd the guidanceby whichyou brought me to become a preacher f your word to your people anda dispenser f your acrament. nd suppose have the strength o declareall this n order exordine], et hedrops of my ime re too precious, ndfor ong havebeen full of a burning esire o meditate n Thy awand to



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confess o you both my knowledge nd my ack of skill n it, the firstbeginnings f the ightyou shed on me and the remnants f my darkness,until my weakness e swallowed p in strength.

Now, it would be easy to imagine that ex ordine has a simplechronological significance nd that not only the "plot" of a life storybut the memory that recalls it has the pattern or nonpattern) thatE. M. Forster n Aspects f the Novel describes as that of the mostprimitive kind of fiction: "and then . . . and then . . . and then."8Indeed, I have at times claimed that the narrator of a life-storyremembers in reverse chronological order as s/he has lived andnarrates in forward chronological order. I am not sure that this saltogether wrong, but I do feel that the matter s considerably morecomplicated than this rather simple formulation would suggest.

Much earlier in the Confessions, hen Augustine is engaged inrecounting ex ordine he stories of so many things, he gives a hintof what the source and nature of the order sought and discovered(or invented) might be: "sine me, obsecro, et da mihi circuirepraesenti memoria praeteritos ircuitus rroris mei, et immolare tibihostiam iubilationis." Rex Warner, whose translation have beenquoting, renders the passage thus: "Allow me this, beg, and grantme the power to survey n my memory now all those wanderingsof my error in the past and to offer nto Thee the acrifice f rejoicing"(CSA4.1). This is interesting s it emphasizes the root meaning oferro "to wander," "to stray") so that we have "wanderings of myerror [or of my wandering] n the past," but it fails to capture thewordplay that repeats circuire "to go round in a curve") in circuitus("a going round in a circle, circuit, revolution") and that suggestslinguistically he isomorphic relationship etween the act of memoryand the act of narrative. Peter Brown comes closer to capturingthe pun of the original n his translation: Allowme, I beseech You,grant me to wind round and round in my present memory thespirals of my errors."9 or Augustine, the winding round and roundin present memory s the precise linguistic nd structural nalogueof the going round in a circle of errors of the past, and a narrativethat would be adequate to the experience of present memory aswell as the experience of past erring must display that one samestructure hat is responsible, according to Augustine, for the con-tinuity f identity etween past experience and present memory ofthat experience. Moreover, a Latin dictionary will tell us that inrhetorical erms Cicero is cited for this usage) circuitus ignifies aperiod"; and for a rhetorician of Augustine's eminence this wouldsuggest that rhetoric-specifically he rhetoric of narrative-is fully



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capable of rendering equally the circuitus f past errant experienceand the circuitus f present imitative memory.

That Beckett, too, wishes desperately and strains mightily oachieve this same sort of equivalence of experience, memory ofexperience, and what I have just termed the rhetoric of narrativeis, I think, unquestionable: "you must say words, as long as thereare any, until they find me, until they say me." Tom Driver, n anaccount of a conversation he had with Beckett in Paris, quotesBeckett to this effect: One cannot speak anymore of being [as, onemight interject, Augustine could do], one must speak only of themess." As an artist, Beckett went on to say, "one can only speak ofwhat is in front of him, and that now is simply the mess." Then,according to Driver's account, Beckett

began to speakabout the tension n art between he mess nd form. Untilrecently, rt has withstood hepressure f chaotic hings. t has held themat bay. t realized hat o admit hemwas to eopardizeform. How couldthe messbe admitted, ecause t appears to be the very pposite f formand therefore estructive f the very hing hat rt holds tself obe?"Butnowwecan

keept out no

longer,ecausewe have come nto time when

"it invadesour experience t every moment. t is there nd it must beallowed n ... What am saying oesnot mean that here willhenceforthbe no form n art. It only means that there willbe new form, nd thatthis form willbe of such a type hat t admits he chaosand does not tryto say that the chaos is really omething lse. The form nd the chaosremain eparate. he latter s not reduced o the former. hat is why heform tself ecomes preoccupation, ecause t exists s a problem eparatefrom he material t accommodates. o find form hat ccommodates hemess, hat s the task of the artist ow."'"

The belief that the chaos of experience must not be reduced simplyto the form f the art work, but rather hat the two should necessarily"remain separate," in a very nearly intolerable tension and antag-onism, has various consequences for Beckett's repeated and renewedattempts t narrating life. First of all (for my purposes), there isthe tremendous difference from Augustine in narrative means thatthis belief entails. Augustine, we recall, says of the act of recitation/narration, "And what is true of the whole

psalmis also true of

every part of the psalm and of every syllable n it. The same holdsgood for any longer action, of which the psalm may be only a part.It is true also of the whole of a man's life, of which all of his actionsare parts." For Augustine, the form of a life narrative did not atall, as Beckett puts it, exist "as a problem separate from the material



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it accommodates." On the contrary, he form and the material itaccommodates are, for Augustine, one and the same and they areboth thoroughly traditional-one might almost say conventional, fone thinks, for example, of the account of Augustine's conversion,which has within it echoes of earlier conversions (St. Paul's, ofcourse, but also intratextual onversion accounts: Simplicianus's aleof Victorinus and Ponticianus's embedding of several conversionswithin a single narrative) and which, in its turn, provided theconventions according to which conversions would be narrated forcenturies to come.

A second consequence of accepting Beckett's argument that thetask of the contemporary rtist s "to find a form hat ccommodatesthe mess" would be that for a writer n the modern world therecould be no security in the set of narrative conventions thatAugustine partly accepted from previous life narrators but mostlyestablished for future ones. To seek a form that accommodatesthe mess will mean obeying in the strictest way the modernistinjunction to "make it new," refusing not only any traditionalnarrative onventions hat may exist but also any momentary ormalsuccesses the individual writer may have enjoyed in previousattempts, and this Beckett unquestionably did in the astonishingseries of works of the last forty years or so of his life: Molloy,Malone Dies, Waiting or Godot, The Unnamable, ndgame, Krapp'sLast Tape, How It Is, Happy Days, Not I, Company, ll Seen Ill Said,and Worstward o, each a renewed attempt "to find a form thataccommodates the mess," neither easing nor falsifying he situationthat demands the narrative effort nd the search for the accom-modating form. And yet, while Beckett certainly seeks an evernew form, subtly adapted to the mess in front of him, and whilehe rejects those conventions of narrative that we might think ofas Augustinian, he works to an impossible end-impossible as hehimself ees it-that is precisely he end to which Augustine workedand to which, as Augustine saw it, he could well hope to attain.Nor is Augustine without formal lessons for the twentieth-centurywriter, t least as far as Beckett has been concerned. "I take nosides," Beckett wrote to Harold Hobson. "I am interested n theshape of ideas. There is a wonderful sentence in Augustine: 'Donot despair; one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume; oneof the thieves was damned.' That sentence has a wonderful shape.It is the shape that matters."" This "wonderful sentence" (which,incidentally, s much easier to find in Beckett than in Augustine),or rather the passage in Luke to which it refers, is, of course,central to the dramatization of the mess in Waiting or Godotwhere



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Didi, after musing, "One of the thieves was saved. ... It's areasonable percentage," goes on to worry that, although all fourof the evangelists "were there-or thereabouts" at the time of thecrucifixion, nly one of the four mentions that one of the thieveswas saved.12 The blankness in the other three evangelical accountspresumably reduces the "reasonable percentage" considerably.

In the conversation with Tom Driver, Beckett turns once againto his "wonderful" Augustinian entence and precisely n the contextof discussing the "chaos" for which the artist must seek an accom-modating form. "Yes. If life and death did not both present them-selves to us," Driver quotes Beckett as saying,

there would be no inscrutability. f there were only darkness, ll wouldbe clear. t is because there s not only darkness ut also light hat oursituation ecomes nexplicable. ake Augustine's octrine f grace givenand grace withheld: have you pondered the dramatic ualities n thistheology? wo thieves re crucified ith Christ, ne saved and the otherdamned. How can we make ense of this division? n classical rama, uchproblems o not arise. The destiny f Racine'sPhedre s sealedfrom hebeginning: he willproceed nto the dark. . . Within hisnotion larity

is possible, ut for us who are neither Greek nor Jansenist here s notsuch clarity. he question would also be removed f we believed n thecontrary-total alvation. ut where we have both dark and light we havealso the nexplicable.'3

It is interesting, nd very much to the purposes of the presentdiscussion, that the twentieth-century ramatist hould ally himselfwith the saint of the very early Middle Ages (who long found itdifficult o break from his adherence to Manichaeanism) rather thanwith Greek or Jansenist, for whom there was clarity ven if onlythe clarity f darkness. The implication hat we must take from thisis that Augustine, for all his apparent assurance that a life couldbe narrated in the same way that a psalm could be recited, faced(at least in Beckett's udgment) something f the same mess or chaosas his twentieth-century escendant in life narration. For Beckett,if not for Augustine (and I am not so very sure that this may nothold for Augustine as well), the primary agent in the making ofthe mess-and perhaps in its unmaking too-is nothing other thanhuman

memorywhich, like narrative n Beckett, s obsessive, self-

creative and self-destructive, faculty hat for better and worse ismuch more than a faculty, oo often out of our control or anycontrol. "And through the spaces of the dark," Eliot writes in"Rhapsody on a Windy Night," nd one thinks f all of the narratingvoices of Beckett's ate fiction,



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And through hespacesof the darkMidnight hakes he memoryAs a madman hakes dead geranium.'4

Let us look a little more closely now at what Augustine says ofmemory, primarily n books 10 and 11 of the Confessions,nd atwhat memory s as dramatized and analyzed by Beckett, primarilyin Company.

Book 10 of the Confessions, e should recall, onstitutes ugustine'sattempt at confessing not "what I have been but what I am, .what I am inside myself, beyond the possible reach of ... eyesand ears and minds" (CSA 10.3).It is confession of himself, not ofhis actions, not even of his thoughts, ut confession of his very selfthat Augustine undertakes n book 10, and it s altogether ignificanthow immediately he comes to memory n this confession of himself.Here narrative, ven at this moment the product of memory, n anact strikingly nalogous to Augustine's attempt to discover Godwhere he dwells, tries to turn back on itself and inside out toencompass memory, ts very begetter, within the narrative frame.This, as Augustine comes to realize, is like the mind trying o knowitself which, n turn, may be, although Augustine certainly oes notsay this, rather ike the eye trying o see itself. n the De Trinitate,in response to those who "will say that this s not memory wherebythe mind, which is always present to itself, s said to rememberitself, ince memory s concerned with the past and not with thepresent," Augustine argues thus: "Wherefore, s in past things, hatis called memory which makes it possible for them to be recalledand remembered, o in a present thing, which the mind is to itself,that is not unreasonably to be called memory, by which the mindis present to itself, o that t can be understood by its own thought,and both can be joined together by the love of itself."'5 The mind,through memory-and in the Confessions ugustine will say thatmind and memory are one and the same thing-can recall expe-riences of the past, but it can also, in the present, recall itself toitself, can be understood by its own thought," nd this too, whereby"the mind is present to itself," s accomplished through memory.

Memory is altogether specific to the individual, according toAugustine, but beyond its particularity nd uniqueness it also affordsa bridge between time and eternity nd is the nonlocatable locuswhere the individual may discover God, "the embracement of myinner self-there where is a brilliance that space cannot contain, asound that time cannot carry away, a perfume that no breezedisperses, a taste undiminished by eating, a clinging together that



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no satiety will sunder" (CSA 10.6). Attempting o make his mindpresent to itself o that he may make it present also to his readers,Augustine simultaneously eeks to know the God who is the em-bracement of his inner self: "I shall pass on, then, beyond thisfaculty of the senses] in my nature as I ascend by degrees towardHim who made me. And I come to the fields and spacious palacesof memory, where lie the treasures of innumerable images of allkinds of things hat have been brought n by the senses" (CSA10.8).Here one is reminded that in the Middle Ages memory was calledthe interior sense, as it were the integrative nd summative sensethat transforms he rich but disordered experience of the externalsenses-which, however, re likewise pecific o the individual-intothe stuff f selfhood, giving o that xperience the shape and patternof the interior ense itself: and through these senses, with all theirdiverse functions, act, retaining my identity s one soul" (CSA10.7).

There is, in Augustine, no distinguishing f memory from theself. "Great indeed is the power of memory " he exclaims. "It issomething errifying, y God, a profound and infinite multiplicity;and this thing s the mind, and this thing s I myself" et hoc animusest, et hoc ego ipse sum) (CSA 10.17).And when it comes to theact of remembering Augustine has no problem at all in assertingthe first erson singular: "It is I myself who remember, , the mind"(ego sum, qui memini, go animus) (CSA 10.16).It is otherwise withBeckett however; the act of remembering n Company,with whatshould be, according to Augustine, a concomitant calling in beingof a self continuous across time, assumes all the pathos attendantupon yearning on the one hand and failure on the other. Of thevoice that comes to one lying on his back in the dark we are told,"Another rait ts repetitiousness. epeatedly with nly minor variantsthe same bygone. As if willing him by this dint to make it his. Toconfess, Yes I remember. Perhaps even to have a voice. To murmur,Yes I remember. What an addition to company that would be Avoice in the first erson singular. Murmuring now and then, Yes Iremember" C 16). Memory, ike narrative, s obsessive in Beckett,but it s ultimately nsuccessful n evoking "the first erson singular."The twentieth-century ct of confession-and I take it that Beckettis

deliberately noddingto

Augustinein the sentence, "To confess,

Yes I remember," which, in its confess-remember equence, is nomore than a reversal of the Augustinian "recordor et confiteor:remember and confess"--yields only a subjunctive condition that,however much desired, is contrary to fact: "What an addition tocompany that would be " That this "would be" will never become



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"is" we can know, f we haven't known it long since, from the lastwords of Company, here even the conditional "I" has disappearedand the hope of company that might ensue upon confessing "YesI remember: ego memini" is seen to be simply, adly illusory:

And you as you always wereAlone.

(C 89)

There is finally o company n Company, o "I" and no remembering,and false, therefore, s "[t]he fable of one with you in the dark,"and false, too, "[t]he fable of one fabling of one with you in thedark" (C 88-89). Narrative, n this latter-day arable, has no morevalidity, no more power to seek out and to discover or to create aself than has memory. Augustine describes, but can hardly magine,the state in which Beckett's narrator finds himself when, in book10 of the Confessions, e says, "[T]his force of my memory isincomprehensible o me, even though, without t, I should not beable to call myself myself" CSA 10.16).This describes the affliction,though it is virtually nimaginable to Augustine, of the Beckettianfigure, unable to call himself himself because without he assurancethat memory would give of a continuity f being or of being at all.When the voice of The Unnamable ays, "In the meantime no sensebickering about pronouns and other parts of blather. The subjectdoesn't matter, here is none" (BT 331), I take it that "the subject"has not only inguistic nd grammatical eference ut epistemological,ontological, and theological overtones as well. It is to be remarkedthat in drawing the bond between the force of memory and theability "to call myself myself,"

Augustine employsthe subjunctive

to describe the condition of not having memory, not having an "I"and a self, whereas Beckett employs t to describe the condition ofhavingmemory, n "I" and a self, he state of being able "To confess,Yes I remember": "What an addition to company that would be"-but never will be for this bereft, ate-twentieth-century nheritor fthe Augustinian confessional mperative.

As Augustine explores his own memory and analyzes the natureof memory tself n book 10 of The Confessions,e presents, n effect,two different models for memory,

uitedistinct ne from the other

and widely divergent n their mplications for the act of narrating.The first f these I will term an archaeological model, the seconda processual model. When offering us an archaeological model formemory, Augustine writes of levels and layers and deposits; hethinks n spatial terms and speaks of "the great harbor of memory,



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with its secret, numberless, nd indefinable recesses," of "the fieldsand spacious palaces of memory, where lie the treasures of innu-merable . . . things," and of "a vast and boundless subterraneanshrine." Who," he goes on to ask rhetorically, Who has ever reachedthe bottom of it?" When the archaeological model is in play, theimplication s that memory s something ixedand static, site wherethe archaeologist of memories can dig down through layer afterlayer of deposits to recover what he seeks. And when he finds thememories he is looking for, heywillbe as they were when deposited,unchanged except as they may have suffered from the decayingeffects of time. "When I am in this treasure house," Augustinewrites, I ask for whatever like to be brought out to me, and thensome things are produced at once, some things take longer andhave, as it were, to be fetched from a more remote part of thestore" CSA 10.8).On occasion, the wrong memories come forward,but this presents no problem to Augustine: "With the hand of myheart I brush them away from the face of my memory, until thething that I want is discovered and brought out from its hiddenplace into sight." And when it s a question of going into the treasurehouse of memory to recite a psalm or to narrate a life story,everything omes out ex ordine, n order, as Augustine says of thestories he has been telling throughout the Confessions:And somethings are produced easily and in perfect order, ust as they arerequired; what comes first ives place to what comes next, and, asit gives place, it is stored up ready to be brought out when I needit again. All this happens," according to Augustine, "when I repeatanything by heart," and we have to recall, although it must beproleptically, he reciting of a psalm that will come in book 11.

"All this I do inside me, in thehuge

court of mymemory,"Augustine says, continuing the archaeological model for memory;

but within a few lines he subtilizes and modulates this descriptionuntil, almost imperceptibly, e comes to be employing a processualmodel for memory which plays itself out in temporal rather thanspatial metaphors.There too [in the huge court f my memory] encountermyself; recallmyself-what have done, when nd where did it, and in what tate fmind I was at the time. There are all the things remember o have

experiencedmyself r to have heard from others. From the same storetoo I can take out pictures f things whichhave either happened to meor are believed n the basis of experience; can myself eavethem ntothe context f the past, nd from hem can infer uture ctions, vents,hopes, and then can contemplate ll these as though heywere n thepresent. CSA10.8)



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Weaving, as a characteristic metaphor for the operation of memory,will have a long history n the tradition of life writing hat springsfrom Augustine's Confessions. nlike the archaeological dig, theweaver's shuttle and loom constantly produce new and differentpatterns, designs, and forms, and if the operation of memory s,like weaving, not archaeological but processual, then it will bringforth ever different memorial configurations nd an ever newlyshaped self. The verb translated as weave n this passage is contexo("to weave together"), from the root texo "to weave"): "ex eademcopia etiam similitudines rerum vel expertarum vel ex eis, quasexpertus sum, creditarum lias atque alias et ipse contexo praeteritis."The relevant part of the passage might be literally ranslated, "Iweave these remembered experiences together into likenesses ofthings of the past" (though one must acknowledge Rex Warner'stranslating ngenuity ince his "context of the past" picks up on andrepeats the contexo f "I weave together"). The past participle oftexo s the neuter textum r masculine textus,meaning "that which swoven" and figuratively, f a written omposition, "texture, tyle,"or of discourse, "mode of putting together, onnection." t also, ofcourse, gives us modern English text, which is hardly a step awayfrom a narrative text like this one of Augustine in process beforeus. Augustine weaves his weaving, his text, his narrative, weaves itout of memories that are themselves n process and taking on newforms, even as he analyzes and describes memory by way of ametaphor of weaving. This makes the narrating f a life story, uledby a metaphor of weaving, something different from reciting apsalm, ruled by a metaphor of archaeological recovery. Yet eventhe latter may not be quite so fixed in character and significanceas it at first eems if we recall

Hegel's sayingthat the old man

repeats the same prayers he learned as a child but now altered,weighted, given entirely new coloring and a different motionalaffect by the experience of a lifetime.

Beckett's weaving of memories into a narrative that will simul-taneously compose and decompose a text s as double as Penelope'sactivity n the Odyssey: eaving a shroud for Laertes by day andundoing it by night to keep the suitors at bay. For Beckett's variousnarrators, as for him as narrator of their narrating, he dual actof

rememberingnd

narratings at once

painfuland

pleasurable,at once necessary and impossible. And drawing the analogy toPenelope's weaving a shroud is not altogether idle, for Beckettconceives of his weaving as an act both of life and of death: hisnarrative destroys as it creates, it devours the life it records as itdevours the remaining sheets in the exercise book and the pencil



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with which he writes. n the trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, and TheUnnamable) e summons all those stand-ins for his own life, "at leastfrom Murphy on" as we are told in The Unnamable, o that theirlives can be consumed one last time in the consummation of theultimate narrator's ife. "But I write hem all the same," Moran saysof the lines he puts down as the narrative of Molloy's life, "I writethem all the same, and with a firm hand weaving inexorably backand forth nd devouring my page with he indifference f a shuttle"(BT 122). Weaving and devouring-the double image suggests thatwith Beckett memorial narrative s itself both the ultimate sign oflife and the cancellation of that life and a movement into death.All of his late fictions move in this direction, devouring the bit oflife remaining as words come to an end and narrative exhaustsitself. "But this innumerable babble, like a multitude whispering?"Malone asks of himself n Malone Dies. "I don't understand. Withmy distant hand I count the pages that remain. They will do. Thisexercise-book s my life, this child's exercise-book, t has taken mea long time to resign myself o that. And yet I shall not throw taway. For I want to put down in it, for the last time, those I havecalled to my help, but ill, so that they did not understand, so thatthey may cease with me. Now rest" (BT 252). And so Malone-orBeckett, rather, the "devised deviser devising it all," as he says ofhimself n Company-with firm hand weaves inexorably back andforth nd devours his page-not, however, as Moran claims, "withthe indifference f a shuttle" but with considerable emotional an-guish: "Devising figments o temper his nothingness. . . Deviseddeviser devising it all for company. In the same figment dark ashis figments" C 64).

Augustine,of course, is not

happyor complacent about the

memories he has of his preconversion elf, but still those memoriesdo not generally have about them the same open-wound painfulnessor the desperately yearning quality that memories have in Beckett.Augustine established a long tradition of narrative confession assomething compelled by God and imposed as a duty on everyChristian. Beckett hasn't this explanation or justification n God'swill for his repeated performances n recalling and narrating, butthe activity s at least as obligatory nd compulsive for Beckett asfor

Augustine--indeed,rather more so, I would

say.It is difficult

to say, for a character ike Krapp in Krapp's Last Tape, whether hismemories of a very distant love relationship are more painful ormore pleasurable, but for certain obsessive, recurrent memories inBeckett's writing there can be no doubt about the dominance ofpain; yet they will not be denied but must be narrated and not



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once only but again and again. "Memories are killing," ccordingto the narrator of a story alled "The Expelled." "So you must notthink of certain things, f those that are dear to you, or rather youmust think of them, in your mind, little by little. That is to say,you must think of them for a while, a good while, every day severaltimes day, until they ink forever n the mud."6 The only problemwith this strategy nd advice is that the real and really painfulmemories decline to sink forever n the mud. There is one suchmemory n Company hat makes earlier appearances in MaloneDiesand in a piece called "The End" from Stories nd Texts or Nothing.Here is the memory as narrated in Company:

A smallboy you come out of Connolly's tores holdingyour mother ythe hand. You turn right nd advance in silence southward long thehighway. After some hundred paces you head inland and broach the longsteep homeward. You make ground in silence hand in hand through thewarm still summer air. It is late afternoon and after some hundred pacesthe sun appears above the crest of the rise. Looking up at the blue skyand then at your mother's face you break the silence asking her if it isnot in reality much more distant than it appears. The sky that s. The blue

sky. Receiving no answer you mentally reframe your question and somehundred paces later look up at her face again and ask her if it does notappear much less distant than in reality t is. For some reason you couldnever fathom this question must have angered her exceedingly. For sheshook off your little hand and made you a cutting retort you have neverforgotten. C 12-13)

Never to have forgotten is always to have remembered, and nomatter how often thought f, ittle y ittle, n the mind, this memoryis not

goingto sink n the mud. As recalled and

reportedn Malone

Dies-as woven into a likeness of something experienced in thepast-the episode goes like this:

One day we were walking long the road, up a hill of extraordinary teepness,near home I imagine, my memory s full of steep hills, get them confused.I said, The sky is further way than you think, s it not, mama? It waswithout malice, I was simply thinking f all the leagues that separated mefrom t. She replied, to me her son, It is precisely s far away as it appearsto be. She was right. But at the time I was aghast. I can still see the spot,opposite Tyler's gate. A market-gardener, e had only one eye and woresidewhiskers. That's the idea, rattle on. (BT 246)

As with Augustine's model for narration, where a psalm or a lifestory, once recited or narrated, becomes available again for re-



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recitation and re-narrating, o this unfortunate experience seemsto offer itself for telling again and again. As we are told of thevoice of memory n Company, Another trait is] its repetitiousness.Repeatedly with only minor variants the same bygone" (C 20). InMalone Dies, in addition to the repetition of the story "with onlyminor variants," we are given a suggestion of how to deal with suchinsistent nd painful memories: surround them, drown them withmore narrative; distract the mind's attention with the irrelevantinformation hat Tyler was a market-gardener who had only oneeye and wore sidewhiskers. That's the idea, rattle on," until youget over this treacherous and rough patch in the narrative. Notthat this will sink it in the mud, but at least it allows you to go onuntil the next time the memory thrusts tself upon you and intoyour narrative, s it does once more in The End: "Now I was makingmy way through the garden. There was that strange light whichfollows a day of persistent rain, when the sun comes out and thesky clears too late to be of any use. The earth makes a sound asof sighs and the last drops fall from emptied, cloudless sky. A smallboy, stretching ut his hands and looking up at the blue sky, skedhis mother how such a thing was possible. Fuck off, she said. Isuddenly remembered I had not thought of asking Mr Weir for apiece of bread.""7 That's the idea, rattle on about Mr. Weir and apiece of bread. Who wouldn't, if addressed by his mother in thismanner?

No one would claim that this obsessive memory that turns upseveral times n Beckett's fiction as world-shaking mportance boutit, but then neither does the stealing of pears in St. Augustine. Sowhy do both of them tell their stories with such urgency? Why-as I had Augustine asking at the beginning of this paper-"Whythen do I put before you [before God] in order the stories of somany things?" Beckett in effect sks the same question, but puts itin the mouth of his partner in dialogue in "Three Dialogues withGeorges Duthuit." The premise of his writing, Beckett says in thefirst dialogue, and the premise of any art sufficiently onscious ofthe conditions under which it must be produced in our time tomake that art of any value, is "that there is nothing to express,nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no

powerto

express,no desire to

express, togetherwith the

obligationto express."'" And by the time of Company ot only s there "nothingwith which to express, nothing from which to express, no powerto express," and so on, there is also no longer any narrative I" todo the expressing. (Yet curiously enough-especially curious afterthe trilogy nd its conclusion in The Unnamable-there s in Company



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something to express: the series of bygones, sixteen ?) in number,of which the voice speaks and which constitute coherent, followablelife story. Moreover, most of the episodes can be, on externalevidence, directly associated with Beckett. That is, the voice isspeaking to Beckett f his own bygones.) When, n the third dialogue,Duthuit asks why, hen, given the general absence of content, means,and ability to express, the artist is obliged to express, Beckett'sanswer is of an ultimate implicity: I don't know" (142). Augustinecould say, "Because God so wills t." Beckett never gives this response,but there is nevertheless the sense that it is a force outside andbeyond him that compels him to the narrative ct, that obliges himto tell and retell his story by weaving together ikenesses of thingsof the past remembered now in the present. One might ay, on themodel of la poesiepure, that a text like The Unnamable onstitutesan instance of la narration ure: narrative without substance, formwithout ontent; or perhaps more accurately, t takes form narrativeform-as content. t shows us a consciousness or a subject n questof itself, but as the Unnamable says, "the subject doesn't matter,there s none." It seems to me that he question of whyboth Augustineand Beckett are obliged to narrate their stories s like asking whythey-and all of us-possess and have imposed upon us the capacityand the necessity for remembering. Once you answer the onequestion, I suspect you will have the answer to the other, but foras long as we are within he circle of remembering nd narrating-so long, that s, as we are alive-Beckett's seems the only intelligentanswer: "I don't know."

On the occasion of his seventieth irthday, eckett told his Britishpublisher, John Calder, that n old age work would be his company.However futile t was, however helpless to make anything outsideitself happen, the work of remembering nd narrating became hiscompany, his obligation, perhaps his salvation. It is as if Beckettresponded to Freud's observation that there is nothing of value inhuman experience but love and work by shearing away the firstand leaving only work. It is a mighty bleak vision, but as honestand courageous as it is bleak; what is especially curious aboutBeckett's vision, however, as expressed in its extreme form at theend of The Unnamable, ay, or in the conclusion to Company, s thatit is positively yrical, ven buoyant in its rhythms, n its style andmanner, even as it is grimly pessimistic n its message (if we canspeak of a message in Beckett). It seems profoundly paradoxicalthat a statement bout the apparent futility nd meaninglessness fhuman life n its twin spects of remembering nd narrating houldbe (as I feel t anyway) o songlike, o lyrical, o irrepressibly uoyant.



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MEMORY ANDTHE NARRATIVE IMPERATIVE 879

But I wonder if this sn't merely reformulation f the "wonderfulsentence" that Beckett found in St. Augustine: "Do not despair;one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume; one of the thieveswas damned." Of the end of The Unnamable r Company ne mightsay that the paradoxical sentiment xpressed seems to be: "Do notdespair, the lyrical buoyancy says, for you may be saved; do notpresume, the vision says, for you may be damned." Is this not anexpression, for our time, of the (nearly) impossible and totallyparadoxical tension "between the mess and form," s Beckett termedit in his conversation with Tom Driver? I wonder, too, if what Ihave been calling the buoyancy f the ast words of Company, oweverbleak they may be in themselves r in what they seem to be saying,is not due to a parallel buoyancy n the narrative mpetus. "Tell usa story": s there not something ncipiently xciting and inherentlybuoyant-the buoyancy of the human spirit tself-in that demandand its satisfaction? Supine now you resume your fable where theact of lying cut it short," the final portion of Company egins:

Supinenowyou resumeyour fablewhere he act of ying ut t short. Andpersist illthe converse peration uts t short gain. So in the dark nowhuddled and now supine you toil n vain. And ust as from he formerposition o the atter he shift rows asier n time nd more lacrious ofrom he atter o the former he reverse s true. Till from heoccasionalrelief t wassupineness ecomeshabitual nd finally herule. You now onyour back n the dark shall not rise to your rse again to clasp your egsin your arms and bow down your head till t can bow down no further.But with ace upturned or good labour n vain at your fable.Till finallyyou hear how words re coming o an end. With very nane word littlenearer o the ast. And how the fable too. The fable of one with you inthe dark. The fableof one

fablingf one with

youn the dark. And how

better n the end labour ost and silence. And you as you alwayswere.

Alone.(C 87-89)

LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY

NOTES

1 Samuel Beckett, Waiting or Godot, n The Complete ramatic Works London, 1986),p. 57.2 St. Augustine, The Confessionsf St. Augustine, r. Rex Warner New York, 1963),bk. 11, ch. 1, hereafter ited in text by book and chapter number as CSA.3 Samuel Beckett, The Beckett rilogy:Molloy,MaloneDies, The Unnamable London,1979), p. 277; hereafter ited in text as BT.



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4 Samuel Beckett, Proust New York, 1970), pp. 4-5.5 Samuel Beckett, CompanyNew York, 1980), 45-46; hereafter ited in text as C.6 The French

wayof

saying"I was born"

(Jesuis ne: I am

born),as Germaine

Brae has remarked in an unpublished ecture), gets around this problem of narratingthe unrememberable event very deftly, hough it also introduces some complexitiesinto the situation that the philosophically nd linguistically impler English locutiondoes not have. "Je suis ne~i Geneve en 1712 d'Issac Rousseau, Citoyen, t de SusanneBernard, Citoyenne" I am born in Geneva in 1712 to Issac Rousseau, Citizen, andto Susanne Bernard, Citizen). Thus Rousseau's narrative brings him into the world,but is he recording a historical birth or is it a birth nto narrative that occurs onlyas a simultaneous consequence of the act of writing he words "Je suis ne . . ."? SeeJean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Confessions,d. Jacques Voisine (Paris, 1964), p. 5.7 Samuel Beckett, Krapp's Last Tape, in Complete ramatic Works, . 217; hereafter

cited in text as K.8 See E. M. Forster, Aspects f the Novel New York, 1927), pp. 61, 66.9 Peter Brown, Augustine f Hippo: A Biography Berkeley, 1967), p. 164.10 Tom Driver, "Beckett by the Madeleine," ColumbiaUniversity orum, , no. 3(Summer, 1961), p. 23.11 Harold Hobson, "Samuel Beckett: Dramatist of the Year," International heatreAnnual, no. 1 (1956), 153-55.12 Beckett, Waiting or Godot, n Complete ramatic Works, . 14.13 Driver, "Beckett by the Madeleine," p. 24.14 T. S. Eliot, "Rhapsody on a Windy Night," n Collected oems 1909-1962 (NewYork, 1963), p. 16.15 St. Augustine, The Trinity, r. Stephen McKenna (Washington, D.C., 1963),14.11.14.16 Samuel Beckett, Stories nd Texts or Nothing New York, 1967), p. 9.17 Samuel Beckett, TheEnd, in FourNovellas, r. Samuel Beckett nd Richard Seaver(London, 1977), p. 74.18 Samuel Beckett, Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit," n Disjecta, d. RubyCohn (London, 1983), p. 139; hereafter ited in text.

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james olney: memory and narrative.pdf