With ‘back’, Beckett indicates seven pages later that he is returning to ‘two’: ‘That said on back to try worse say the plodding twain … Least worst failed of all the worse failed shades … And yet say first the worst perhaps worst of all the old man and child. Worst in need of worse’ (pp. 30–31). This is another new step, because the comparative ‘worse’ is abandoned for the superlatives ‘worst’ and ‘the worst’. In passing, Beckett ‘unsays’, as he does several times, an initial affirmation that proves false from the standpoint of the text’s logic: ‘Here now held holding. As when first said. Ununsaid when worse said. Away. Held holding hands!’ (p. 32). Inverting the process (‘Ununsaid when worse said’), with the critical irony that accompanies each of his technical feats Beckett restores, in a double negative that renders it positive, the first formulation, which turns out to be best from the standpoint of the logic of the worst.
Having next stressed not the worst but the least (‘So leastward on … To last unlessenable least how loath to leasten’ [p. 33]), he undoes the twain but not conclusively, so as to retain a new possibility of worsening it: ‘Gone held holding hands they plod apart … Not worsen yet the rift. Save for some after nohow somehow worser on’ (p. 34). And then he increases the void between the old man and the child: ‘Two once so one. From now rift a vast. Vast of void atween … That little better worse’ (p. 41). In the final references to the twain, the three shadows merge, indistinct and alike: all three have become ‘[t]opless baseless hind-trunks. Legless plodding on’ (p. 43).
James Knowlson has highlighted the fact that images of childhood recur in Beckett’s texts, including the most obscure and abstract of them.6 The image of an old man and a child hand in hand, present in numerous texts in various forms, is one of those figures that Beckett has called ‘obsessional’. And we cannot resist seeing in it the moving, evanescent sketch of a final image of his father, a memory of childhood happiness, a trace in the memory of the old man that he has himself become. Through these polished forms Beckett also summons up what is most intimate and most hidden. The seemingly most mechanical variations of the ‘twain’ are also the most pathetic: ‘Two once so one. From now rift a vast. Vast of void atween’ is an evocation, in an incredible resume, of the past closeness of father and child and the irreparable death of the father that has separated them, when the rending apart of their previously clasped hands has become irreversible. We also discover at the end that the upright body, and then bowed shadow (the worsened body), unidentifiable, is the pathetic one of a woman: ‘Nothing and yet a woman. Old and yet old. On unseen knees. Stooped as loving memory some old gravestones stoop. In that old graveyard. Names gone and when to when. Stoop mute over the graves of none’ (p. 45).
Worstward Ho is also a virtually explicit synthesis of Beckett’s formal questions and uncertainties. In it he explains his previous attempts, the solutions hit on in other books – in connection with the disposition of the body, for example: ‘No choice but stand … Somehow stand … Simply up. A time when try how. Try see. Try say. How first it lay. Then somehow knelt. Bit by bit … Till up at last. Not now. Fail better worse now’ (p. 10). The same decision in favour of symmetrical austerity is made as regards place: ‘A place. Where none. A time when try see. Try say. How small. How vast. How if not boundless bounded. Whence the dim. Not now. Know better now. Unknow better now’ (p. 11). Here Beckett relates how he tried in other texts to refer to something out of frame, a reality existing outside textual closure. But in Worstward Ho there are no longer any concessions to the ultimate conventions of literary realism, no longer things or places (there are still some objects at the beginning of the text – boots and overcoat – but they very rapidly disappear). Beckett accomplishes his project of an absolutely self-sufficient writing, generating its own syntax, vocabulary, self-ordained grammar, even creating terms that respond exclusively to the logic of the pure space of the text: no more referents, no more attempts to imitate reality or provide an equivalent to it, no more direct links of transposition or description of the world – a text that is indebted solely to itself for the fact that it could be written.
A Poetic Art
The logic of the worst implies crossing, entangling, piling up all the comparatives in degressive order (strict, precise worsening is carried out with the comparatives of ‘bad’ for the three shadows and with those of ‘less’ for the dim and the void). In this respect, the prepositional economy of English allows for infinite construction and alliterative play that yield the most dishevelled forms and proliferating constructions –‘best bad worse of all’, ‘for want of worser worst’, ‘unworseable worst’, ‘unworsenable worst’, ‘worse better later’, ‘unmoreable unlessable unworseable evermost almost void’ – and the recurrent form of the whole text, emblem of this oxymoronic universe: ‘How better worse so-missay?’.
These comparatives, which all strive for the inverted perfection of the aesthetic of lessness, yoked to this implacable logic, are suddenly confronted with the rule already stated above: ‘Add? Never’ (p. 21). In the land of the worst, logically enough, one can only subtract, diminish. It is then no longer possible to integrate the little word ‘more’ into a formulation that is admissible in terms of the rule of the worst. But what if ‘more’ means ‘less’, as in ‘more obscure’ for example? Beckett raises the question, advances, circumvents grammatical obstacles and difficulties, and then states the law: ‘Back unsay better worse by no stretch more. If more dim less light then better worse more dim. Unsaid then better worse by no stretch more. Better worse may no less than less be more’ (p. 37). As we can see, such a project involves an impeccable logic and coherence. And that is why Beckett, on the basis of his rules, never stops raising and circumventing all the contradictions, paradoxes and impossibilities generated by pejoration and failure. To state the bad as badly as possible in order to try extricate oneself from it, and make obsessive images of the worst disappear, is not unproblematic.
As has been said, the text operates by ‘backs’ in order to worsen some particular formulation. Reflexivity and examination of the systematicity of the mechanism occupy a very great deal of space. The writing progresses to the beat of an astonishing play of questions and answers, of interrogation of the consistency of the text and the validity and effectiveness of the process. We might even imagine that it involves a kind of dialogue, a text with two voices, with questions and objections from an alter ego who is rather sick and tired, rather doubtful, and who chalks up all the errors and inconsistencies: ‘What? Yes’; ‘No mind and pain? Say yes’ (pp. 8–9).
Among the logical objections that arise straightaway are those of place and time. These two founding instances of any literary narrative, referring at once to the text’s field and what is out of frame, are subject to constant alterations that emerge like second thoughts whenever it is necessary to make concessions to grammatical and referential order. One cannot advance the hypothesis of an absolute independence of the text with respect to the world, grammar and literary convention. One can simply propose, because one wishes to aim for it, the ‘minimal minimum’ before the disappearance of words and meaning. As early as p. 11, the description of place is problematic: ‘A place. Where none … Know only no out of. No knowing how know only no out of. Into only. Hence another. Another place where none. Whither once no return. No. No place but the one … Whence never once in … Beyond less. Thence less there’ (pp. 11–12). Formulating the objection to himself (to enter one place it is necessary to leave another and envisage positing at least two places, including something out of frame, not in question in our constraints), Beckett explains the rule, which is essential, of his project’s independence (no beyond or beneath, no transcendence or reference to the world). Time, defined at the outset as ‘[a]ll of old. Nothing else ever’ (p. 7), raises precisely the same deductive problem of a time transcending the pastless present of writing: ‘No once. No once in the pastless now. No not none. When before worse the shades? The dim before more? When if not once?’ (p. 38).
‘From now’, ‘so far’, ‘later’, ‘now’