Waiting for Youdi
OESTERREICHER, ARTHUR
Waiting for Youdi Molloy. By Samuel Beckett. Grove. 241 pp. $3.00. Reviewed by Arthur Oesterreicher "If there is one question I dread, to which I have never been able to invent a satisfactory...
...It's I who live there now...
...The second narrative begins when Jacques Moran, living with his halfwit son, receives a message from his "employer" referred to only as Youdi instructing him to find Molloy...
...If it cannot be fully explained, neither can it be explained away...
...He is undoubtedly the most nihilistic of today's talented writers...
...Moran's murder of the man follows in this curious passage: "I can still see the hand coming toward me, pallid, opening and closing...
...But if Molloy is to be considered a representative sample of Beckett's work (he has written four other novels), then he is no Joyce, Kafka or Camus...
...Gradually, his strength ebbs away...
...He has been abandoned by his son...
...He lives with her for a while, then sets out again...
...I don't know how I got there...
...While wandering through a forest, he meets a stranger and brutally assaults him...
...But Beckett has written a book which cannot be taken lightly...
...Molloy's story tells of his rambling, futile odyssey in search of his mother...
...His money is gone...
...Surely not even Mr...
...It is as if Beckett were deliberately thumbing his nose at the reader demonstrating the absurdity of existence by embodying it in his work...
...Much else remains unexplained...
...As for Kafka, surely Molloy and Moran are akin to the land surveyor in The Castle, with their unexplained wanderings and searchings and their ineradicable self-loathing...
...Evidently the two stories are interrelated, and by more than the mere fact that Moran is to find Molloy...
...Too much in this book is unclear and unexplained...
...By this time, Moran, too, is crippled...
...A little later, Youdi's messenger, Gaber, comes to inform Moran that he is to go home...
...As in Waiting for Godot, the structure consists of a binary linking of two narratives, placed side by side rather than linked causally...
...But it is not at this late stage of my relation that I intend to give way to literature...
...Why do all of Beckett's characters wear bowler hats...
...It reflects itself not in the use of language or the thoughts of Beckett's characters, but in the philosophical tone of the entire work...
...Accompanied by his son, he begins the search...
...This obsession with the absurdity of existence permeates the work of Samuel Beckett the latest Irish expatriate to wear the mantle of the Bad Boy of English Letters...
...One finds in Molloy literary artifices reminiscent of Ulysses: the use of question-and-answer, the sly, sometimes undecipherable puns and allusions to Ireland and Irish life...
...I am sorry I cannot indicate more clearly how this result was obtained, it would have been something worth reading...
...But it is Camus's influence that seems most pervasive...
...The man mutters and attempts to ask Moran for something...
...But a little later, perhaps a long time later, I found him stretched on the ground, his head in a pulp...
...He, too...
...Why the author's emphasis on bicycles as a mode of transportation...
...He still does not know what Youdi really wanted of him or...
...It ends with Moran writing his...
...Beckett is so puckish...
...He has no idea where Molloy might be, or what the real purpose of his mission is...
...indeed, who Youdi is...
...is beset by adventures, culminating one evening when he meets a stranger in a wood "a dim man, dim of face and dim of body...
...Not even the feeblest ray of hope falls on the lives of the characters in Molloy...
...As if self-propelled...
...High as the author's intent may have been, it has not been realized...
...Although he doesn't even know whether she is still alive, he is overcome one day by a need to see her...
...Not without significance, there is a reference in Molloy to Camus's beloved myth of Sisyphus...
...When he returns home, he sits down to write his "report" to Youdi...
...He abandons his drifting, purposeless existence and starts on his journey...
...It is marked by a series of meaningless adventures and encounters: He meets a woman named Lousse when his bicycle runs over and kills her dog...
...One further note: That the critics have been thoroughly obfuscated by Molloy is strikingly evidenced by the claim of a French critic (cited on the jacket) that "in a final, ironic climax, Moran kills Molloy without recognizing him...
...In the end, he is left at the edge of the forest, incapable of going any further, unaware of where he is and of where his mother might be found, apparently no nearer to his goal than when he started...
...Beckett is obviously in debt to a number of his contemporaries and predecessors, most heavily Joyce, Kafka and Camus...
...Or are we to assume that Molloy changed clothes in the forest, threw away his crutches, and did die at Moran's hands, that his "mother's room" is really death...
...Since he does not know the name of the town he is going to, his voyage is not easy...
...He does not even know whether he has succeeded in finding Molloy...
...This is a little too thick...
...There is no attempt at explaining the private universes of Molloy and Moran...
...The man Moran kills not only is not dressed like Molloy, but he is not a cripple...
...Molloy begins with the title character sitting in his mother's room, writing his story...
...Furthermore, the book opens with Molloy telling his story, beginning with the words: "I am in my mother's room...
...Why the predilection for certain compulsions, such as the hat-switching sequence in Godot, which is paralleled by Molloy's switching his "sucking stones" from one pocket to another...
...Yet there are passages in Molloy of truly poetic beauty, sections which successfully convey the characters' feelings of hopelessness, inadequacy, and lostness...
...Molloy is divided into two narratives of roughly equal length: The first is the story of Molloy, a crippled old man, the second that of a mysterious "investigator," Jacques Moran...
...Much of it is tedious reading especially parts of Molloy's story...
...Many other such parallels are scattered throughout this disturbing and exasperating book...
...It is a pity that Beckett has chosen to be so chary with clues as to his intention...
...I do not know what happened then...
...One can only conclude that this must be the case...
...Reviewed by Arthur Oesterreicher "If there is one question I dread, to which I have never been able to invent a satisfactory reply," says Jacques Moran, one of the two major protagonists in this novel, "it is the question of what I am doing...
...They move in a heavy, dark fog of purposelessness, spurred on by desires and duties they do not understand, waiting, generally eagerly, for death to relieve them of obligations...
...The only novel in modern literature which resembles Beckett in this respect is The Stranger...
Vol. 39 • June 1956 • No. 24
