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The STUDIA UNIVERSITATIS BABEŞ-BOLYAI issue article summary
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Abstract: Murphy, Beckett’s first novel to be published, underwent a literary ‘trial’ before coming out in 1938; the publishers’ objections are telling as to the novelistic games the text proposes and, equally, to the readerly expectations and narrative conventions Murphy breaks with. To the publisher’s proposal that Beckett delete or suppress the opening (which, according to the author, was ‘plain sailing enough’), the whole chapter II (Amor Intellectualis quo M. se ipsum amat) as well as the game of chess between Murphy and Mr Endon, Beckett defends what to his old-world publishers must have appeared as his work’s idiosyncrasies, stressing particularly those features that his writing might have seemed short of – compression and structure: ‘…Do they not understand that if the book is slightly obscure it is because it is a compression and that to compress it further can only result in making it more obscure? The wild and unreal dialogues, it seems to me, cannot be removed without darkening and dulling the whole thing. They are the comic exaggeration of what elsewhere is expressed in elegy, namely, if you like, the Hermeticism of the spirit. Is it here that they find the “skyrockets”? There is no time and no space in such a book for mere relief. The relief has also to do work and reinforce that from which it relieves. And of course the narrative is hard to follow. And of course deliberately so. |
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