Life in the Cylinder
HEYMANN, C. DAVID
Life in the Cylinder The Lost Ones By Samuel Beckett Grove Press. 63 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by C. David Heymann Department of English, State University of New York at Stony Brook Samuel...
...This seemingly redundant directive is repeated in Watt: "Do not come down the ladder, If or I haf taken it away...
...their customs and habits are regulated by conventions and laws "of obscure origin...
...everything boils down to a game of search and wait and search again...
...The searchers," on the other hand, wait their turn in long queues to climb the cylinder's ladders, as if driven by some absence of self...
...This cylinder, we are told by a frigidly detached narrative voice, is "50 metres round and 18 high . . . vast enough for search to be in vain, narrow enough for flight to be in vain...
...The greatest plight of this pitiful population is not that its existence is bleak, but that it continues to exist at all...
...It contains 200 inhabitants, or "one body per square metre," and 15 ladders propped haphazardly "without regard to harmony" against its solid rubber walls...
...Such instances are fleeting, however, momentary lapses from the society's ideal that each member preys on everyone else...
...Interestingly, these examples recall a remark of Wittgenstein's from the Tractatus: "My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless when he has climbed through them, on them, over them...
...This pessimism, offering so vast a potential for nihilism, finds its corollary for Beckett in his obsessive insistence that life, for all its cruel idiocy and absurd horror, must be endured to the bitter end...
...Whatever else these exact statistics may signify, they do suggest that we are still in a somewhat rational domain...
...to do so they must be supported by the others, steadying the ladder in "an instant of fraternity...
...Beckett has of course used ladder symbolism before...
...In his now-famous dialogues with Georges Duthuit, the author spoke of "the expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express...
...The tallest climbers, standing on the topmost rung, can barely touch the cylinder's ceiling...
...The sedentary" in the cylinder "never stir from the coign they have won . . . because they have decided their best chance is there and if they seldom or never ascend to the niches and tunnels it is because they have done so too often in vain or come there too often to grief...
...And in Endgame Clov mounts a ladder to describe the dismal scene outside Haxnm's house...
...Barren plains and empty sea-shores, jars and boxes, all point to a planet that is rapidly running its inevitable and downward course...
...Meanwhile, the voice of the bodiless narrator drones on, compiling a veritable encyclopedia of numerical data, recording like a dutiful weatherman the rhythmic alterations of atmospheric conditions inside the cylinder, the intensity of an eternally blazing stream of redyellow light, the hectic pattern of a world's strict yet insignificant rituals...
...Man's suffering, cruelty and loneliness, the absurdities of life itself, have rarely found a more desolating metaphor...
...Elsewhere Beckett has stated this idea more directly...
...He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up on it...
...The ladders, apparently, represent a means of achieving wisdom, each step carrying the searcher that much closer to some unfathomable truth...
...And ladder-climbing, like bicycle-riding, trying on a pair of shoes, or going for long walks in the country, helps to pass the time of day...
...The society that exists amid this "gloom and press" is made up of four kinds of beings...
...Beckett and Wittgenstein both arrived at the same image to describe the utter futility of ever attaining knowledge, as well as the utter folly of pursuing it in the first place...
...Despite the motion and commotion of The Lost Ones, therefore-the climbing and crawling, the moiling and toiling little actually transpires...
...In his latest novel, The Lost Ones (Le Depeupleur)the only work he has published since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969 beckett portrays a world of lost and hopeless souls endlessly roaming the cramped niches and tunnels inside a flattened cylinder...
...Reviewed by C. David Heymann Department of English, State University of New York at Stony Brook Samuel Beckett's art, as critics have variously noted, is about emptiness, the void, nothingness, waiting, passing time, silence, impotence, fragility, the need to communicate, the impossibility of communication, the destruction of language, "the T which bears witness to the Self," the pursuit of "equilibrium in entropy...
...Murphy draws a ladder up after him when retreating into the safety of his attic garret at Mercyseat, as a voice bellows out: "Do not come down the ladder, they have taken it away...
...No element of Beckett's oeuvre demonstrates these themes more clearly than the settings of his plays and his fiction...
...The sedentary-searchers" (who, unlike the searchers, occasionally pause in their meaningless efforts) and "the non-searchers" (who sit for the most part against the wall) round out this forlorn congregation of "little people...
Vol. 56 • March 1973 • No. 5
