Infinity Breeds Contempt: The Social

Infinity Breeds Contempt: The Social Critiques of the Tragically Immortal Narrator in Malone Dies

Malone Dies features a narrator trapped in a never-ending narrative loop, unable to escape his panoptic existence either through the introduction of surrogate characters or bodily death. His narration is disjointed as a result of blending his story with that of other characters and the narrative repetition this causes, but these problems also give him a certain clarity that allows him to effectively critique the social forces keeping him entrapped within the novel. Though his mind fails him and forestalls the complete death of consciousness he desires, Malone does at least succeed in pointing out the illusions of human society.

Like the other books in his trilogy, Samuel Beckett's Malone Dies features an indeterminate narrator ostensibly discussing a variety of other characters but is in reality mentally and narratively drifting between these characters and identities in attempt to escape his total confinement (figurative and literal), like a ghost hiding from the oppressing solitude of the afterlife by inhabiting so many bodies. Furthermore, Malone finds himself trapped in the same kind of narrative loop as the other novels' protagonists, in which his attempts to escape from surveillance and oppression only serve to carry him back to the beginning of his narrative. Where Malone distinguishes himself is in his apparent apathy in regards to his situation, and it is this apathy which reveals the particular philosophical work being done by the novel. In short, Malone's torturous existence and failed attempts at introducing a kind of Derridian difference into his otherwise bland existence bestow upon him a certain kind of manic clarity that allows for trenchant critiques of the domineering social structures which created his unwanted existence in the first place.

All Rooms in One, or None

In the novel, Malone is characterized as an old man who lies dying in a dark and anonymous room, from an anonymous cause; he never explicitly reveals to the reader exactly what malady afflicts him, or whether he is in a hospital, asylum, prison, or possibly even his own home. The room in which he is confined 'is in the undifferentiated location, that is, in an unknown building on an unknown street in an unknown town,' suggesting to the reader that for all intents and purposes, Malone and his room exist in no time or place, but rather float in a kind of imaginary void, asymptotically on the verge of existing in any time and place, in any room (Friedman, 1970, 133). Thus, the novel forces the reader to simultaneously imagine Malone as definitively nowhere, yet possibly anywhere. Neil Murphy sees this paradoxical nature as characteristic of postmodern fiction, noting that as metaphors for the construction of a fictional space, "the Chinese box, or mise-en-abyme, offers endless destabilizing possibilities,' because 'both the maze and the Chinese box subvert any ontology that might resemble what we call the "real," to erect a world that operates by a series of rules not regulated by conventional notions of temporality or encyclopedic geographical space,' but instead uses its unique orientation of time and space as a means to comment on the nature of human perception and experience (Murphy, 2004).

In a sense, the undifferentiated nature of the room requires that it be read as a kind of Platonic ideal of a room, the total confinement of walls to which all rooms aspire but never reach (a fact that should give the reader some sense of the novel's position regarding the confining force of society). He is entirely alone, and 'has no contact with others, not even with the charitable woman who used to feed him' when he takes on the role of Macmann (Reid, 2003, 118). Even the single possibility of someone other than Malone or a space outside the room actually existing is never realized, because all that ever appears is a free-floating hand that 'puts a dish on the little table left there for that purpose, takes away the dish of the previous day, and the door closes again' (Beckett, 1991, 184). The hand does not even enter the room per se, but is simply there when it needs to be, just like the little table 'left there for that purpose.'

Nothing exists outside the room, but because 'nothing is more real than nothing,' Malone wishes "before I go I should like to find a hole in the wall behind which so much goes on, such extraordinary things, and often coloured" (186, 230). The reader should note that Malone specifically wishes to see through a hole in the wall and not the door, because this detail further reveals the singular nature of the room. Were Malone to look through the door at what lies beyond, he would simply see the reality outside the room, because the act of looking through the door cements the reality beyond it, such that the undifferentiated room becomes solid, attached to a building, and part of a larger reality. In a sense, the room would transition from the Platonic, total room to a specific room, one of the infinite possibilities embodied by the room existing in the void.

Looking through a hole in the wall, on the other hand, does not cement the meaning of the room to a specific space, because a hole in the wall does not perform the same kind of connective function as a door. To better understand this detail, one may consider the notion of liminality, which is 'a borderland state of ambiguity and indeterminacy, a transformational state characterised by a certain openness and relaxation of rules, leading those who participate in the process to new perspectives and possibilities,' that in literature is commonly associated with 'borders and crossroads, as well as physical features, such as rivers or the shoreline and liminal thresholds like windows and doors' (Gilsenan Nordin & Holmsten, 2009, 7). The door is only a liminal threshold in the act of opening or closing, because when closed it becomes a wall, and when open the division between inside and outside is erased, leaving only one continuous space. Looking through a hole in the wall, then, would allow Malone to peer into this liminality without affecting it, or put another way, to see all of the possibilities beyond a door without having to open it and thus reduce those possibilities to a singularity. Thus, Malone's desire to find a hole in the wall is the desire to confront the infinite nothingness and potential around him, to visually experience the meaningless void that is usually filled in the moment it comes under someone's gaze. He desires to face the most real thing, which is to say, nothing, or more specifically in the case of biological organisms, death.

Escape Attempts

Thus, 'from this enclosed, shrunken world Malone speaks to us, his readers, with a voice cut off from the world, a voice which speaks in order to hear itself speak, completely present to itself alone' yet somehow aware of an impossible externality, which is the ever present gaze of the reader that forces Malone to remain eternally in the room, unable to truly die, even if he does claim that 'I could die today, if I wished' (Toyama, 1984, 88-89, & Beckett, 173). Just as looking through the door might solidify and specify the room, so too does the act of reading define Malone and his environment, so that even though the time and space in which the room exists is indeterminate, it remains paradoxically easy to trace the intricacies of Malone's physical and mental activities, to the point that it almost seems like high-tech hidden cameras are placed within the room, allowing for the recording of even the smallest details of Malone's diminutive physical movements and mental shifts. Just like Michel Foucault's 'panoptic society of which imprisonment is the omnipresent armature' and where 'the delinquent is not outside the law,' but rather is 'from the very outset, in the law, at the very heart of the law, or at least in the midst of those mechanisms that transfer the individual from discipline to the law," Malone finds himself always already wholly described and circumscribed, with every detail of his person available to the wholly encompassing societal structure that in this case takes the form of the reader, but which Malone eventually reinforces and implicitly supports via his own storytelling (Foucault, 1977, 301). Understanding this fact ultimately unlocks the entirety of the novel for the reader, because it serves to explain all of Malone's narrative diversions, inconsistencies, and confusions.

A claim this bold will of course require a robust analysis and evidentiary support, but for now, the explanation provided by an understanding of the details provided about Malone and his behavior in the room can be summarized as follows: over the course of the novel, Malone is recalling past events of his life as he fades away towards death, with his recollections and narration becoming increasingly disjointed as his memory fails him, but he is also always reliving this slow death, having gone through it an infinite number of times already due to the narrative loop in which he finds himself; though the novel ends with the apparent concurrent deaths of Malone and Macmann, one may actually read the supposed death of Macmann as the beginning of Malone's narration, because the story of Macmann necessarily occurs some imaginary time before Malone's confinement in the room

. Malone dies just as he finally does away with the alternate identities of his storytelling, such that he can be seen as 'becoming Malone' at the same moment of Malone's death, so that his death forces the reader to recall the beginning of the story and the Malone already in existence there, restarting the narrative loop.

In effect, Malone's storytelling creates an infinitely looping continuity that diminishes the finality of his death, because 'although the physical body will eventually die, we cannot be sure that consciousness discontinues,' and in fact, the novel seems to suggest that Malone's consciousness never ultimately discontinues, but rather briefly goes dark before being reactivated once again at the beginning of the novel (White, 2009, 45). The tragedy, of course, is that Malone is entirely unequipped to deal with this kind of torturous immortality, so his mind is frayed and confused, with different characters and moments forcing their way into his consciousness seemingly against his will. Thus, he constantly reviews questions in his mind, attempting to think, but he knows that whatever he allows into the forefront of his consciousness will only make him more confused: "If I start trying to think again I shall make a mess of my decease" (Beckett, 176). There is too much fluidity and complexity to the ideas in his mind, composed as they are from the recollections and experiences of an infinite number of readings, so he continuously hops from one subject to another with little organization, from the stars in the sky, to the clouds and birds, to the few possessions he retains. Thus, Malone's story 'starts with flawed narration, goes on to more fragmented forms, and ends with the semi-coherent and utterly opaque' before returning to the beginning (Richardson, 1953, 2).

In a way, Malone's malady is revealed to be the complications arising from the over-examined life, forced into a constant reappraisal by the panopticonic environment in which he eternally finds himself. Malone oscillates between participating in this surveillance though his recounting of seemingly unimportant details and attempting to escape it through his deployment of stories that seems almost like a tragicomic blending of One Thousand and One Nights and The Canterbury Tales. Malone attempts to escape his oppressive condition through death, and 'the way he sets out to achieve this is by deploying a careful sequence of strategic distractions: telling himself four stories, performing an inventory of his possessions, and finally dying' (McDonald, 2006, 98). In short, Malone 'seeks to free himself from his identity through writing' and in doing so escape the panoptic confinement which defines that identity in the first place (Higgins, 2007, 38).

These four stories mirror the telling of four stories by each character in The Canterbury Tales (two stories on the way to Canterbury and two while returning to London) but in Malone Dies the situation is slightly different; the narrator knows that death is the journey of no return, and so has planned to tell all four stories on the path towards death, literally to ease his pain and boredom as he is stuck in a room, but in the context of the entire novel, the stories serve to direct the attention of the reader elsewhere, to focus the solidifying gaze on other characters so that Malone may drift into nothingness. This plan ultimately fails, as 'the seemingly disparate narrative voices turn out in the end to be mere projections of a single isolated consciousness' (Richardson, 1953, 95). Malone "loses himself completely in his stories as he weaves in and out of the Sapo, Macmann, and Moll tales, before ending finally with his death (or rather his disappearance) in the final episode" (Catanzaro, 2004, 120). Malone periodically takes on the identity of Macmann, and even the locations in Malone's stories serve to blend together different narratives, because the House of Saint John of God asylum in which Macmann stays is remarkably similar to locations in Beckett's other works, in particular Murphy's fictional Magdalen Mental Mercy seat and the unnamed sanatorium of Watt (Smith, 2002, 25). This is why 'the names change, the figures blur, they may be different persons or the same person, or figments of Malone's own personality,' but all serve the same dual purpose (Barrett, 1956). This dual purpose is noted by Joseph Brooker in his consideration of boredom in Malone Dies when he states:

To speak, or to write, as it may be, with his dwindling stub of pencil lead, is to produce variation, to take flight from what Adorno, after Beckett, calls the 'eversame': to introduce a saving margin of differences into a continuum otherwise blankly homogeneous. This view of the role of Beckettian discourse would echo what I think is a rather traditional assumption that language, for this writer's characters, staves something off -- although perhaps the major candidate for that something has been death or the void of an absurd universe, rather than the more bathetic threat of boredom (Brooker, 2001, 31).

This 'saving margin of differences' mentioned by Brooker bears some similarities to the notion of difference as discussed by Jacques Derrida, especially in the latter's consideration of the 'theater of cruelty,' which is the performers' act of violently disrupting the false reality of ideology through the ephemeral production of a play, resisting all attempts at solidification and thus panoptic ensnarement through the play's unique existence as an objectless performance. This theory is crucial to an understanding of Malone Dies, because the difference potentially created by the theater of the cruel is precisely the kind of ideological weapon that serves to uncover the 'ultimate reality' that 'is rarely perceived' due to the fact that "the world [is] a mysterious place where appearances are deceptive' and 'the human sensory apparatus and intelligence provide poor equipment' for uncovering these deceptions (Rabinovitz, 1977, 40).

Derrida proposes that "the theatre of cruelty would be the art of difference and of expenditure without economy, without reserve, without return, without history,' something towards which Malone strives but ultimately fails (Derrida, 1978, 248). In his storytelling, Malone is attempting 'a representation which is not repetition […] a re-presentation which is full presence, which does not carry its double within itself as its death [….] a present which does not repeat itself, that is, […] a present outside time, a nonpresent' which 'offers itself as such, appears, presents itself, opens the stage of time or the time of the stage only by harboring its own intestine difference' (Derrida, 1978, 248). Malone wants to tell his stories, to present them as such, as separate from his own person so that they may redirect the attention of the reader and subsequently free him from the repetition of the novel, but 'he cannot keep himself separate from the story he is telling' and so the 'saving margin of difference' he attempts to introduce into the novel never materializes; Malone ultimately never distinguishes himself from Macmann, and neither Malone's nor Macmann's deaths provide the violent, 'cruel' rupture Malone seeks (Pattie, 2000, 69). "Malone of course disowns his memories altogether, giving them to various characters such as Sapo and Macmann with whom he identifies only reluctantly" because he wants them to exist separate from him, to live and die and leave him to his own mortality (Barry, 2006, 100). Thus, at one point Malone abruptly breaks off his narration, wondering if he is not 'talking yet again about himself' before continuing on:

Soon I shall not know where Sapo comes from, nor what he hopes. Perhaps I had better abandon this story and go on to the second, or even the third, the one about the stone. No, it would be the same thing. I must simply be on my guard, reflecting on what I have said before I go on and stopping, each time disaster threatens, to look at myself as I am. That is just what I wanted to avoid. But there seems to be no other solution (Beckett, 183).

Malone ultimately loses control over his own stories, although he determines that "I shall try and go on all the same, a little longer, my thoughts elsewhere, I can't stay here. I shall hear myself talking, afar off, from my far mind, talking of the Lamberts, talking of myself, my mind wandering, far from here, among its ruins" (210). However, the one positive element of Malone's condition, then, is that he seems to realize the impossibility of escape early on, which ultimately produces the apathy mentioned earlier on in this essay and allows Malone to produce some of the most trenchant critiques of society in the novel.

The Eternal Critic

One somewhat comical results of Malone's temporal-loop induced narrative madness is that it seems to provide him with a savagely acute eye for the ridiculous dramas and goals of society, leading him to use the story of Sapo/Macmann as a means of satirizing dramas, romances, and the notion of a divine providence. Thus, when the novel remarks that 'he often heard them talk of what they ought to do in order to have better health and more money. He was struck each time by the vagueness of these palavers and not surprised that they never led to anything,' one may read the phrase 'each time' to actually mean each time Malone experiences the narrative loop (Beckett, 181). Of course Malone is disdainful of Sapo's family, because he has always already been hearing their vague attempts at financial gain an infinite number of times. The love scene between Macmann and Moll is similarly harsh, portraying 'a hideous parody' of romantic love that serves to exemplify 'human failure' by imposing the panoptic gaze upon their act in order to dispel any notions of romance or genuine love: 'for given their age and scant experience of carnal love, it was only natural they should not succeed, at the first shot, in giving each other the impression they were made for each other' (Ashwood, 2003, 9-10, & Beckett, 324). As Ashwood notes:

While rather comical, the sexual language that Beckett uses to describe the intimate relations between Moll and Macmann is devoid of emotion. By failing to incorporate any sign of affection in the couple's love scene, Beckett portrays sex as an awkward and pathetic occurrence that mocks and ridicules notions of love and romance. Through humorous yet emotionless sexuality, Beckett reveals a sense of listlessness and isolation, both very disturbing deficiencies of the human experience (10).

Moll's eventual death and replacement by Lemuel makes sense in light of Malone's increasing misanthropy towards the characters of his creation, and Lemuel himself can be seen as the embodiment of Malone's vengeance against characters which have failed, repeatedly and eternally, to provide an escape from the confinement of his room. Finally, he simultaneously mocks the notion of divine providence and the societal impulse to forestall death even when death might be preferable to a tortured life when he states that 'there is providence for impotent old men, to the end. And when they cannot swallow any more someone rams a tube down their gullet, or up their rectum, and fills them full of vitaminized pap, so as not to be accused of murder' (246). Having sufficiently mocked the entire range of the human experience all the way from the life-giving act of intercourse to the life-imposing feeding tube without ever escaping the crushing oppression of that experience in the face of a panoptic society, all that remains for Malone is to kill, to attempt some final escape through the detonation of all narratives within the novel.

Attempted Murder

Malone is strikingly casual in his claims of murder, and these statements reveal Malone's status as the tragic narrator, entrapped by the multiplicity of his own narrations. He states that 'then it will be all over with the Murphys, Merciers, Molloys, Morans and Malones, unless it goes on beyond the grave,' claiming responsibility not only for a number of Beckett's other characters, but specifically for their deaths, remarking 'how many have I killed, hitting them on the head or setting fire to them? Off-hand I can only think of four, all unknowns, I never knew anyone' (246). Earlier on he claims to have murdered at least five other men, and one may read Malone as ultimately responsible for Lemuel's hatchet-work at the conclusion of the novel, increasing his body count by at least two. This casual relation to death makes sense, as Malone is yearning for his own death throughout the novel such that 'Malone Dies resembles a book of reckoning' due to his constant reappraisal of his present state and desire to catalogue his belongings prior to death (Uhlmann, 1999, 114). Lemuel's actions in particular reveal Malone's final fruitless attempt to fully die, to fully discontinue his own consciousness.