In spite of his horror of unending life, Beckett has always had a penchant for uncomfortably palpaple representations of premature termination. Malone remarks of one of his characters; "It is right that he too should have his little chronicle, his memories, his reason, and be able to recognise the good in the bad, the bad in the worst, and so grow gently old all down the unchanging days and die one day like any other day, only shorter." (T 191) An abrupt c o nclusion mars the magisterial syntax that would, like a
life, "grow g e ntly old" and come to an end only in the fullness of time. A traditional consolation about the timeliness of human mortality - "to everything there is a
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season [ . . . ] a time to be born and a time to die" - is here belatedly revised. W a t t , too, has an acute sense of the untimely.
Take, for instance, the description of Watt's speculations on the length of his stay at K n o t t ’s house.
If the period of service, first on the g r o u n d - f l o o r , and then on the first floor, was not one year, then it was less than one year, or more than one year. But if it was less than one year, then there was want, seasons passing, or a season, or a month, or a week, or a day, wholly or in part, on which the light of Mr. Knott's service had not shone, nor its dark brooded, a page of the discourse of the earth unturned. For in a year all is said, in any given latitude. But if it was more than one year, then there was surfeit, seasons passing, or a season, or a month, or a week, or a day, wholly or in part, twice through the beams the shadows of the service of Mr. Knott, a fragment of rigmarole re-read. For the new year says nothing new, to the man fixed in
space. (130-1)
This passage articulates a dilemma that lurks behind much of Beckett's work. To use a word that was sufficiently important to Beckett to become the suggestively ambiguous title of a late prose piece, one wants to be able to utter the satisfied "enough" that indicates the overcoming of want, but not the impatient "enough" that suggests surfeit.
The passage makes use of the balanced antitheses that are so characteristic of this novel, but which are less noticeable in the subsequent work. The antithesis in the passage quoted clearly sets elegy against parody, yearning against disgust. On the one hand there is an anxiety about unfulfilled potential, and on the other an anxiety about excess. Transience and longevity are weighed in the balance and found to be equally irksome.
The crucial juxtaposition is that of the image of the "page of the discourse of the earth unturned" with that of the "fragment of rigmarole reread". The first metaphor reaches back to the classical notion of the book of nature. It is a richly suggestive line, containing subsidiary images. "The earth unturned" is a picture of seasonal arrest; not only is it suggestive of a planet halted in its cosmological course but also of the ground unploughed and hence unprepared for the renewal of growth. In the second part of the passage a loss of coherence is registered; "page" has become "fragment", "discourse" has become "rigmarole". The notion of meaningful continuity has been replaced by that of rambling incoherence. Sequence is u s urped by repetition.
re-read pages and to leave them unturned.
In a sense the passage offers two explanations for the novel's obsessive use of permutative lists. On the one hand they are produced out of a desire to leave no stone
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unturned , a need to say all that can be said, on however limited a subject, in the face of time that is running out. On the other hand they seem driven by a sort of crazed spirit of parody, eager to turn sense into nonsense by means of almost infinite rereadings or r e interprétât ions of certain "events (if one may speak here of events)" (129). The novel wavers, then, between elegy and parody, between discourse and rigmarole.
A couple of pages later the narrator tells of Watt's sense, outside the "haven" (133) of Knott's house, of
the languor of the task done but not ended, the fever of the task ended but not done, the languor and the fever of the going of the coming too late, the languor and the fever of the coming of the going too soon. „
(133) I take this to be another reference to "surfeit" and "want" (boredom and need, tedium and desire) in situations where
time is either surplus to requirements or simply not enough. Later we're told of Mr. Gorman, the station-master, and his wish to leave a superior station to his successor "at his retirement, if he did not die before, or on his death, if he did not retire first" (229) There's a hankering here for s y n c h r o n i ci t y, leaving neither a surfeit of unfilled time nor a want of time to fill.
In the light of all this, the apparently absurd ambition of the Lynch family, to attain, as the sum of the ages of each living member, exactly a thousand years, is not entirely an object of ridicule. It is to their e xtraordinary chronicle that I want to turn in the next s e c t i o n .
1.A The Lynch Mille n iu m
The aim of the Lynches, according to Watt's reckoning as narrated by Sam - and there is a sense in which the a s piration is Watt's, for the Lynches are his cerebral creation - is to arrange matters so that the combined ages of the living members of the family adds up to a thousand
years. The precise reason for this is unclear but it seems another of the novel's representations of humans (the Lynches themselves, and Watt too) trying to impose pattern, order, or at least limit on unending and uncontrollable processes. The Lynch millenium is hardly triumphalist in character; it is merely as if, after a thousand years, the Lynches will have somehow completed their sentence. The project is pointless in the sense that its acheivement is both obscure and negligible, and in the sense that the thousand year mark is elusive because no sooner achieved than surpassed.
We are told that when Watt enters Mr. Knott's house the twenty eight members of the family have a combined age of 980 years. (A footnote acknowledges that the figure is wrong; it should, incidentally, be 978). There follows a calculation as to the amount of time the family would have to continue to live in its present form to attain a thousand years exactly. This calculation makes the bizarre assumption that all the ages given are exact, and therefore that every member of the family shares the same birthday which is also the day Watt arrived. In another 8)5 months the "Lynch millenium" (103) will be complete. (i.e. 8)5 x 28 = 238
at all, "if none died, if none were born" (101), that is to say, in one of Beckett's lapidary paragraphs, "If all were spared, the living spared, the unborn spared" (102). The living must be spared from dying, and the unborn spared from living. There's a wonderful even-handedness about this, in its implication that birth and death are matters for equal regret. Watt is more judicious about its judgements on
'life' than, say, the Trilogy.
Of course "all were not spared" (102), and the mill en iu m calculations are jeopardised both by death and by the rigmarole of new life. A child is "expelled" (102), courtesy of Liz, and Liz dies. The millenium is duly retarded. Anne gives birth to two babies which brings the m il l en iu m forward slightly, but then Joe, Bill and Jim all die and "set back the longed-for day [ . . . 1 by no less than seventeen years approximately" (107). Even the wild pr o li fe ra ti on of the Lynch family, a family founded on excess - they are dreamt up to cater for Knott's leftovers - falls short in the end.
The idea of the millenium puts unusual stress on the fact of the frailty of human contemporaneousness. We are given a sense of a communal body living in unison, "[...] puff puff breath again they breathed, in and out, the twenty-eight, and all was changed" (101). But this synchronisation only holds until "there was death" or "there was birth". (101) The novel as a whole is much pre-occupied with generations over a vast stretch of time "until it be so long ago that all trace of them is l o s t " (58). With the Lynch family the emphasis shifts from diachronic patterns of humanity to a synchronic slice of life at a given moment. We're encouraged to think not in consolatory terms of those who sub specie aeternitatis are coming and going, but of
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