dark background against which his images stand out. Therewith he has found, it seems, the precise equivalent of the ‘thing’ painted (according to him) by Bram Van Velde: ‘The immobile thing in the void – here at last is the visible thing, the pure object. I see no other.’5 The dim and the void are Beckett’s response to the spatial conventions posited by the whole literary tradition as conditions of possibility of literature. These five elements are on course for the worst, between ‘somehow’ and ‘nohow’.
Since the book is written in a striving for the ‘worse than worst’, each formulation of its five worsenable objects is going to be repeatedly taken up, imperceptibly altered, broken down with rules stated in conformity with the coherence of the text, towards that melting into the night where the dim itself would disappear. Without unfolding the whole process of ‘worsening’ of the five figures here, let us take the example of ‘two’ – the twain – in its gradual metamorphoses. It makes its appearance on p. 12: ‘In the dim void bit by bit an old man and child … Hand in hand with equal plod they go … Slowly with never a pause plod on and never recede. Backs turned. Both bowed.’ They reappear on p. 16: ‘Dim hair. Dim white and hair so fair that in the dim light dim white. Black greatcoats to heels. Dim black. Bootheels. Now the two right. Now the two left.’
We have hitherto been in the register of the ‘bad’. On p. 21 an initial comparative break is made. By a strict grammatical progression, we pass from ‘bad’ to ‘worse’: ‘A pox on bad. Mere bad. Way for worse. Pending worse still. First worse.’ It is now a question of ‘failing better’ by passing ‘from bad to worsen’. And to this end Beckett provides a decisive new rule for his definition of the worst: ‘Add? Never’ (p. 21). Accordingly, he is now going to embark on a labour of subtraction and diminution: ‘The boots. Better worse bootless. Bare heels. Now the two right. Now the two left … Barefoot unreceding on. Better worse so’ (p. 23).
With ‘back’, Beckett indicates seven pages later that he is returning to ‘two’: ‘That said on back to try worse say the plodding twain … Least worst failed of all the worse failed shades … And yet say first the worst perhaps worst of all the old man and child. Worst in need of worse’ (pp. 30–31). This is another new step, because the comparative ‘worse’ is abandoned for the superlatives ‘worst’ and ‘the worst’. In passing, Beckett ‘unsays’, as he does several times, an initial affirmation that proves false from the standpoint of the text’s logic: ‘Here now held holding. As when first said. Ununsaid when worse said. Away. Held holding hands!’ (p. 32). Inverting the process (‘Ununsaid when worse said’), with the critical irony that accompanies each of his technical feats Beckett restores, in a double negative that renders it positive, the first formulation, which turns out to be best from the standpoint of the logic of the worst.
Having next stressed not the worst but the least (‘So leastward on … To last unlessenable least how loath to leasten’ [p. 33]), he undoes the twain but not conclusively, so as to retain a new possibility of worsening it: ‘Gone held holding hands they plod apart … Not worsen yet the rift. Save for some after nohow somehow worser on’ (p. 34). And then he increases the void between the old man and the child: ‘Two once so one. From now rift a vast. Vast of void atween … That little better worse’ (p. 41). In the final references to the twain, the three shadows merge, indistinct and alike: all three have become ‘[t]opless baseless hind-trunks. Legless plodding on’ (p. 43).
James Knowlson has highlighted the fact that images of childhood recur in Beckett’s texts, including the most obscure and abstract of them.6 The image of an old man and a child hand in hand, present in numerous texts in various forms, is one of those figures that Beckett has called ‘obsessional’. And we cannot resist seeing in it the moving, evanescent sketch of a final image of his father, a memory of childhood happiness, a trace in the memory of the old man that he has himself become. Through these polished forms Beckett also summons up what is most intimate and most hidden. The seemingly most mechanical variations of the ‘twain’ are also the most pathetic: ‘Two once so one. From now rift a vast. Vast of void atween’ is an evocation, in an incredible resume, of the past closeness of father and child and the irreparable death of the father that has separated them, when the rending apart of their previously clasped hands has become irreversible. We also discover at the end that the upright body, and then bowed shadow (the worsened body), unidentifiable, is the pathetic one of a woman: ‘Nothing and yet a woman. Old and yet old. On unseen knees. Stooped as loving memory some old gravestones stoop. In that old graveyard. Names gone and when to when. Stoop mute over the graves of none’ (p. 45).
Worstward Ho is also a virtually explicit synthesis of Beckett’s formal questions and uncertainties. In it he explains his previous attempts, the solutions hit on in other books – in connection with the disposition of the body, for example: ‘No choice but stand … Somehow stand … Simply up. A time when try how. Try see. Try say. How first it lay. Then somehow knelt. Bit by bit … Till up at last. Not now. Fail better worse now’ (p. 10). The same decision in favour of symmetrical austerity is made as regards place: ‘A place. Where none. A time when try see. Try say. How small. How vast. How if not boundless bounded. Whence the dim. Not now. Know better now. Unknow better now’ (p. 11). Here Beckett relates how he tried in other texts to refer to something out of frame, a reality existing outside textual closure. But in Worstward Ho there are no longer any concessions to the ultimate conventions of literary realism, no longer things or places (there are still some objects at the beginning of the text – boots and overcoat – but they very rapidly disappear). Beckett accomplishes his project of an absolutely self-sufficient writing, generating its own syntax, vocabulary, self-ordained grammar, even creating terms that respond exclusively to the logic of the pure space of the text: no more referents, no more attempts to imitate reality or provide an equivalent to it, no more direct links of transposition or description of the world – a text that is indebted solely to itself for the fact that it could be written.
A Poetic Art
The logic of the worst implies crossing, entangling, piling up all the comparatives in degressive order (strict, precise worsening is carried out with the comparatives of ‘bad’ for the three shadows and with those of ‘less’ for the dim and the void). In this respect, the prepositional economy of English allows for infinite construction and alliterative play that yield the most dishevelled forms and proliferating constructions –‘best bad worse of all’, ‘for want of worser worst’, ‘unworseable worst’, ‘unworsenable worst’, ‘worse better later’, ‘unmoreable unlessable unworseable evermost almost void’ – and the recurrent form of the whole text, emblem of this oxymoronic universe: ‘How better worse so-missay?’.
These comparatives, which all strive for the inverted perfection of the aesthetic of lessness, yoked to this implacable logic, are suddenly confronted with the rule already stated above: ‘Add? Never’ (p. 21). In the land of the worst, logically enough, one can only subtract, diminish. It is then no longer possible to integrate the little word ‘more’ into a formulation that is admissible in terms of the rule of the worst. But what if ‘more’ means ‘less’, as in ‘more obscure’ for example? Beckett raises the question, advances, circumvents grammatical obstacles and difficulties, and then states the law: ‘Back unsay better worse by no stretch more. If more dim less light then better worse more dim. Unsaid then better worse by no stretch more. Better worse may no less than less be more’ (p. 37). As we can see, such a project involves an impeccable logic and coherence. And that is why Beckett, on the basis of his rules, never stops raising and circumventing all the contradictions, paradoxes and impossibilities generated by pejoration and failure. To state the bad as badly as possible in order to try extricate oneself from it, and make obsessive images of the worst disappear, is not unproblematic.
As has been said, the text operates by ‘backs’ in order to worsen some particular formulation. Reflexivity and examination of the systematicity of the mechanism occupy a very great deal of space. The writing progresses to the beat of an astonishing play of questions and answers, of
