A Note On "How It I s "

How It Is is usually considered primarily as a post-Trilogy work, but it has peculiar affinities with Watt that are rarely discussed. Both novels, for instance, have similarly indirect modes of transmiss#ion; everything in How It Is is "ill-said ill-heard i11-recaptured i11-murmured"

(HII 7) , and as a result the book is as obscure a relation as W a t t , a novel whose bizarre telling is ill-transmitted "not perfectly clearEly]" (W 164) - through Watt's codes and through Sam.

For the abject creature or creatures dragging through the mud in How It Is life's processes are not pleasant, but have a certain geometric nicety. Like W a t t , and unlike the more loosely structured Trilogy, How It Is is peculiarly scrupulous about order: "natural order" (HII 7) and "justice" (HII 156) are constant refrains, and the dogged speaker speaks nicely of his precise project to "divide into three a single eternity for the sake of clarity" (HII 26). What he calls "the old business of grace in this sewer" (HII 24), "the regimen of grace" (HII 135), is not only a judicial matter, but also an aesthetic one. The novel is

patterned (against the odds) with delicate balance and poise. For all the appalling mess of the mi e n -scene

(recalcitrant to the casual reader) the superficial aridness of this novel, like W a t t , is redeemed by meticulous linguistic fastidiousness and discrimination: both novels are "far from unmelodious"(W 215).

The chief preoccupation that the two works have in common is the detailed tabulation of an infinitely extensive family of m a n ..

Following A r s e n e 's seasonal description of the poor old earth and the vast human family that makes it lousy, How It Is also contemplates "those for whom and under whom and all about whom the earth turns and all turns [ . . . ] days nights years seasons that family" (HII 18). It too is preoccupied with " g e n e r a t i on [s ] (HII 91), "dynasties" (HII 92) and (with some wryness) the "honour of the family" (HII 92).

Consonant with W a t t 's ambivalent meditations on the successive generations that come and go is the only partly ironic recognition in How It Is of "a proce ss io n what comfort in adversity others what c o m f o r t " :

those dragging on in front those dragging on behind whose lot has been what your lot will be what your ^{^t

"In a word, here is all humanity circling with fatal monotony [...]" (D 23), as Beckett wrote in 1929, about Joyce's "Work in Progress". Although the "lot" in How It Is is decidedly not a happy one, this only partly mitigates against the comfort that might be found in the knowledge that it is shared by a lot of "others". For the infinitely proliferating system of alternating tormentors and victims proposed as logical necessity by the speaker is indeed comforting, and this is made clear at the end of the novel when the possibility that there was "never any procession

[ . . . ] never anyone no only me" (159) seems more chilling than any of the visceral cruelties described hitherto. "tOlther inhabitants", however cruel, would be better than the madness of "me sole elect" (HII 14).

Like W a t t , then. How It Is fluctuates between extreme senses of public and private. In one way it is a structured, classical statement of universal application, a general account of "how it is" for each and every one of us: "from sleep I come to sleep return between the two there is all the doing suffering failing bungling achieving until the mud yawns again" (HII 25) In a quite different way it is a "little private book these secret things little book all my

own the heart's outpourings" (HII 92). The novel is thus both the articulation of an impersonal wisdom - "ancient voice in me not mine" (HII 7) - and the intimate diary of a "monster of t...] solitudes" (HII 14).

For all the bleak unchangingness of the situation described in How It I s , the novel - again like Watt - evinces a sense of things as other than merely tedious and repetitious "rigmarole" (HII 147), partly by waxing elegaic about things that pass away: in this novel too there are "losses everywhere" (HII 7). Indeed, for a novel so bleak in its analysis of the human condition. How It Is is also profoundly lyrical in its evocation of a lost life "above in the light" (HII 8).

One of the most central losses, as in the earlier novel, is the "loss of species" (HII 29; W 82); the speaker is only precariously "within humanity [ . . . 1 just barely" (HII 50). The Unnamable's embattled rationalism - "it's human, a lobster couldn't do it" (T 342) - is not enough to ensure the definition of the species in this novel, which tends to find affinities and not distinctions between mankind and the so-called lower orders. Like W a t t , How It Is posits an ecumenically extended family and takes an

inordinate - and comic - interest in man's obscurest relations; it finds time, for instance, for sympathetic "reflections [...] on the fragility of euphoria among the different orders of the animal kingdom beginning with the sponges" (HII 43). The speaker dreams of a fellow creature - "a little woman within my reach" (HII 14) -

or failing kindred meat a llama emergency dream an alpaca llama the history I knew the natural (HII 15) The novel is much preoccupied with natural history - though always questioning the assumptions in "natural" - and with the evolutionary processes that make even an alpaca llama, not to mention sponges, meat that is (however tenuously) kindred. Again and again the novel emphasises "our life in common" (HII 61), man's equal relations with animals: "I wake from sleep how much nearer to the last that of men of beasts too" (HII 30).^^

The novel's concern with "a selection natural order vast tracts of time" (HII 7) brings to mind evolutionary theory. That D a rwinism is indeed in the air is confirmed both by the m i se-en-scene - "warmth of primeval mud impenetrable dark" (HII 12) - and by the speaker's interest in "how I got here" (HII 8) from "the beginning [...] first

signs very first of life" (HII 8). It is not so surprising, then, to find a direct reference to Haeckel (HII 47), one of

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