with Beckett’s writing, we can bring out strict rules of composition and organization. Worstward Ho is a summit of Beckett’s ars combinatoria, prodigiously controlled and devised, the magisterial conclusion to the whole oeuvre.
So we have the worst, posited in the title as a goal to be reached, as a professed project, and which is to be understood not as an approximate, random evocation of the oeuvre, but precisely as an algorithm, a generative formula from which Beckett has produced the ensuing text. The title is, of course, a parody of Charles Kingsley’s well-known Westward Ho and, through this migratory irony, signals both motion and direction. The worst is what must now be striven for – the end aimed at but not yet attained. Attesting to this is the first word of the text – ‘on’ – expressing continuation, effort, movement, a kind of resolute ‘forward’. Beckett immediately raises the problem with a quasi-mathematical rigour: how to say the worst and how to work incessantly to worsen the worst? If, by definition, ‘said is missaid’ whatever one says, how, stylistically, can one convey the idea of the worst and say it ever worse? How can one win the incredible wager of a ‘better’ that would be a successful statement of the worst? To this question of the how, Beckett responds in the first paragraph by adopting two of the modalities allowed by English through variations on the adverb of manner ‘how’: the worst will be reached by setting out from ‘somehow’ to arrive at the point of ‘nohow’: ‘On. Say on. Be said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on.’
Beckett thus states the only two modalities that he will use in the text to attain the worst and, at the same time, defines the minimal form in which he has committed himself to saying it: ‘somehow’ can only be said on the basis of a syntax limited to the essential, a unique punctuation, a vocabulary restricted and reduced to words of the worst. It is as ifhe was giving himself the word and the thing at the same time – an ultimate, extreme attempt finally to make what one says and how one says it coincide. The worst will therefore be written in the precise gap between these two words. It will be written to the extent and for as long as one can write it, as best one can, until one can no longer do so. By immediately positing them as modes of writing, he makes ‘somehow’ and ‘nohow’ things; he substantivizes them and represents them as two points on a line, given as a beginning and an end between which the book will be written.
Later in the text, the terms in which Beckett has posed the problem become clearer: the word ‘blank’, which makes its first appearance on p. 31, signals the distance that still remains to be covered, in order to attain the ‘nohow’ which is so desired as an end (in all senses) of the text: ‘Blanks for nohow on. How long? Blanks how long till somehow on? Again somehow on. All gone when nohow on. Time gone when nohow on’ (p. 31). That is, at the final ‘nohow’, everything – or virtually everything – will have to have disappeared, including and in the first instance time: what is somehow said, as best one can, throughout the text is still of the order of the possible – that is, of the order of time. When one can still act, it is because a future, even an immediate one, can still be envisaged. The point of ‘nohow’, on the other hand, positing that there is nothing left to do, is not in time; it is the culmination of the worst. At this point, words too will have disappeared: ‘Try better worse another stare when with words than when not. When somehow than when nohow’ (pp. 38–9). In the same way, the text’s verbs are mainly employed in the infinitive and past participle, without the mobility of verbal ‘tenses’.
Worstward Ho is perhaps an ultimate, paradoxical, aporetic poetic art: trying everything, trying again, forging ahead as best one can, to the point where it is no longer possible, to the point of the ‘nohow’ that resonates like a strange victory at the very end of the text, when the programme foreshadowed in the initial equation is repeated word for word: ‘Nohow less. Nohow worse. Nohow naught. Nohow on. Said nohow on’ (p. 47).
Once these two modalities have been posited as the text’s generative formula, Beckett states the first of the numerous rules that are going to punctuate Worstward Ho, each new rule being designated by the ‘from now’ that fixes the syntactical or lexical conventions as we proceed: ‘Said for missaid’ (p. 37). Thus henceforth, every time we encounter ‘said’ we should read ‘missaid’. The law of ‘somehow’ involves the necessity of an unstable text that fixes, at the very moment it is written, its own laws of functioning. It recounts nothing but its internal genesis; and it endlessly explains how and why it needs to be written in this particular form at each instant. We remain in the extraordinary double-bind of a rule that is always provisional and shaky, open to alteration at the very moment it is stated. And the initial resolution of sticking in the gap between the two modes of ‘how’ is also that of sticking to a precarious position, in a permanent self-rectification, in an uncertainty that is itself only ever formulated on a provisional basis. The worst might never happen. It is not a question of retaining at any price a posture of rigour, the static imposition of a stylistic constraint, or a novel metaphysical position, but of accepting the inevitable shakiness of ‘somehow’, which is likewise part of the worst in that it leads to its own problematization.
Better Worse
The most formalist is not necessarily the most disembodied. It is through the practice of form that the most acute experience of tragedy finds a decisive, radical and radically new form. If ‘said is missaid’ en route to the worst, there is only one solution for ‘worse missaid’: the position of generalized pejoration.
First operation: transform all idiomatic expressions in which ‘well’, ‘good’ and the like feature to pejorate them: ‘that will do just as badly’, ‘forbad and all’, and so forth. But the change of sign only pejorates the semantic and syntactical surface of the text and, if one likes, indicates the major lines of the project, which is efficient solely in being systematic and pushing to the utmost limit the very idea of the worst that is in play. To missay is to try to say the worst: you can only missay the worst ifyou want to give yourselfa chance to say it, to make the worst to be said and words for the worst coincide, and hence to say the worst as badly as possible. Worstward Ho, assembling all earlier efforts, is a mechanism of ars combinatoria in the mathematical sense, since it attempts, on the basis of the minimum number of elements (the least also being the basis of its definition of the bad), all the operations and combinations that can syntactically be realized. For example: ‘Of all so far missaid the worse missaid. So far. Not till nohow worse missay say worse missaid’ (pp. 35–6). The terminus of this line of reasoning is that it is necessary to fail to say the worst so as to remain within the order of the worst. To fail to say the worst is to provide the optimal statement of it. Becket thus supplies the rule of this novel game (and a strict interrogation of words is to be understood here): ‘That little better worse. Till words for worser still. Worse words for worser still’ (p. 41).
Second operation: worsen the three quasi-narrative elements or figures. Beckett states them, enumerates them, and gives them a coding so as to designate them more simply on each occasion: ‘From now one for the kneeling one. As from now two for the twain … As from now three for the head’ (p. 20).4 Thus we find them distinct, numbered, identified: one, a ‘bowed back’; two, a ‘twain’ – an old man and a child, hand in hand; three, a ‘[h]ead sunk on crippled hands. Clenched staring eyes’ (p. 13).
Through these three figures, we see the labour of literary objectification and materialization at work. The total absence of personal pronouns throughout the text is merely a rhetorical, superficial sign of Beckett’s refusal to adhere to the conventions of literary subjectivism. The emphatic presence of the ‘head’, by contrast, is its most refined expression: it is the materialized presence of a ‘worsened’ subject, which, by means of this unprecedented provocation, has become a mere object. The ‘head’ and its ‘some soft of mind’ are not representations of a metaphysical subject, but mere objective images that themselves produce images. ‘Say a body. Where none. No mind,’ Beckett had posited as a preliminary, in the opening lines of his text (p. 7).
To these
