Beckett thus states the only two modalities that he will use in the text to attain the worst and, at the same time, defines the minimal form in which he has committed himself to saying it: ‘somehow’ can only be said on the basis of a syntax limited to the essential, a unique punctuation, a vocabulary restricted and reduced to words of the worst. It is as ifhe was giving himself the word and the thing at the same time – an ultimate, extreme attempt finally to make what one says and how one says it coincide. The worst will therefore be written in the precise gap between these two words. It will be written to the extent and for as long as one can write it, as best one can, until one can no longer do so. By immediately positing them as modes of writing, he makes ‘somehow’ and ‘nohow’ things; he substantivizes them and represents them as two points on a line, given as a beginning and an end between which the book will be written.
Later in the text, the terms in which Beckett has posed the problem become clearer: the word ‘blank’, which makes its first appearance on p. 31, signals the distance that still remains to be covered, in order to attain the ‘nohow’ which is so desired as an end (in all senses) of the text: ‘Blanks for nohow on. How long? Blanks how long till somehow on? Again somehow on. All gone when nohow on. Time gone when nohow on’ (p. 31). That is, at the final ‘nohow’, everything – or virtually everything – will have to have disappeared, including and in the first instance time: what is somehow said, as best one can, throughout the text is still of the order of the possible – that is, of the order of time. When one can still act, it is because a future, even an immediate one, can still be envisaged. The point of ‘nohow’, on the other hand, positing that there is nothing left to do, is not in time; it is the culmination of the worst. At this point, words too will have disappeared: ‘Try better worse another stare when with words than when not. When somehow than when nohow’ (pp. 38–9). In the same way, the text’s verbs are mainly employed in the infinitive and past participle, without the mobility of verbal ‘tenses’.
Worstward Ho is perhaps an ultimate, paradoxical, aporetic poetic art: trying everything, trying again, forging ahead as best one can, to the point where it is no longer possible, to the point of the ‘nohow’ that resonates like a strange victory at the very end of the text, when the programme foreshadowed in the initial equation is repeated word for word: ‘Nohow less. Nohow worse. Nohow naught. Nohow on. Said nohow on’ (p. 47).
Once these two modalities have been posited as the text’s generative formula, Beckett states the first of the numerous rules that are going to punctuate Worstward Ho, each new rule being designated by the ‘from now’ that fixes the syntactical or lexical conventions as we proceed: ‘Said for missaid’ (p. 37). Thus henceforth, every time we encounter ‘said’ we should read ‘missaid’. The law of ‘somehow’ involves the necessity of an unstable text that fixes, at the very moment it is written, its own laws of functioning. It recounts nothing but its internal genesis; and it endlessly explains how and why it needs to be written in this particular form at each instant. We remain in the extraordinary double-bind of a rule that is always provisional and shaky, open to alteration at the very moment it is stated. And the initial resolution of sticking in the gap between the two modes of ‘how’ is also that of sticking to a precarious position, in a permanent self-rectification, in an uncertainty that is itself only ever formulated on a provisional basis. The worst might never happen. It is not a question of retaining at any price a posture of rigour, the static imposition of a stylistic constraint, or a novel metaphysical position, but of accepting the inevitable shakiness of ‘somehow’, which is likewise part of the worst in that it leads to its own problematization.
Better Worse
The most formalist is not necessarily the most disembodied. It is through the practice of form that the most acute experience of tragedy finds a decisive, radical and radically new form. If ‘said is missaid’ en route to the worst, there is only one solution for ‘worse missaid’: the position of generalized pejoration.
First operation: transform all idiomatic expressions in which ‘well’, ‘good’ and the like feature to pejorate them: ‘that will do just as badly’, ‘forbad and all’, and so forth. But the change of sign only pejorates the semantic and syntactical surface of the text and, if one likes, indicates the major lines of the project, which is efficient solely in being systematic and pushing to the utmost limit the very idea of the worst that is in play. To missay is to try to say the worst: you can only missay the worst ifyou want to give yourselfa chance to say it, to make the worst to be said and words for the worst coincide, and hence to say the worst as badly as possible. Worstward Ho, assembling all earlier efforts, is a mechanism of ars combinatoria in the mathematical sense, since it attempts, on the basis of the minimum number of elements (the least also being the basis of its definition of the bad), all the operations and combinations that can syntactically be realized. For example: ‘Of all so far missaid the worse missaid. So far. Not till nohow worse missay say worse missaid’ (pp. 35–6). The terminus of this line of reasoning is that it is necessary to fail to say the worst so as to remain within the order of the worst. To fail to say the worst is to provide the optimal statement of it. Becket thus supplies the rule of this novel game (and a strict interrogation of words is to be understood here): ‘That little better worse. Till words for worser still. Worse words for worser still’ (p. 41).
Second operation: worsen the three quasi-narrative elements or figures. Beckett states them, enumerates them, and gives them a coding so as to designate them more simply on each occasion: ‘From now one for the kneeling one. As from now two for the twain … As from now three for the head’ (p. 20).4 Thus we find them distinct, numbered, identified: one, a ‘bowed back’; two, a ‘twain’ – an old man and a child, hand in hand; three, a ‘[h]ead sunk on crippled hands. Clenched staring eyes’ (p. 13).
Through these three figures, we see the labour of literary objectification and materialization at work. The total absence of personal pronouns throughout the text is merely a rhetorical, superficial sign of Beckett’s refusal to adhere to the conventions of literary subjectivism. The emphatic presence of the ‘head’, by contrast, is its most refined expression: it is the materialized presence of a ‘worsened’ subject, which, by means of this unprecedented provocation, has become a mere object. The ‘head’ and its ‘some soft of mind’ are not representations of a metaphysical subject, but mere objective images that themselves produce images. ‘Say a body. Where none. No mind,’ Beckett had posited as a preliminary, in the opening lines of his text (p. 7).
To these three figures we must add a semblance of scenery: the dim and the void. To the question ‘Where now?’ with which The Unnamable opens, Beckett now answers, as if modelling himself on the mysterious ‘backgrounds’ of Manet’s paintings, by asserting an empty, dark background against which his images stand out. Therewith he has found, it seems, the precise equivalent of the ‘thing’ painted (according to him) by Bram Van Velde: ‘The immobile thing in the void – here at last is the visible thing, the pure object. I see no other.’5 The dim and the void are Beckett’s response to the spatial conventions posited by the whole literary tradition as conditions of possibility of literature. These five elements are on course for the worst, between ‘somehow’ and ‘nohow’.
Since the book is written in a striving for the ‘worse than worst’, each formulation of its five worsenable objects is going to be repeatedly taken up, imperceptibly altered, broken down with rules stated in conformity with the coherence of the text, towards that melting into the night where the dim itself would disappear. Without unfolding the whole process of ‘worsening’ of the five figures here, let us take the example of ‘two’ – the twain – in its gradual metamorphoses. It makes its appearance on p. 12: ‘In the dim void bit by bit an old man and child … Hand in hand with equal plod they go … Slowly with never a pause plod on and never recede. Backs turned. Both bowed.’ They reappear on p. 16: ‘Dim hair. Dim white and hair so fair that in the dim light dim white. Black greatcoats to heels. Dim black. Bootheels. Now the two right. Now the two left.’
We have hitherto been in the register of the ‘bad’. On p. 21 an initial comparative break is made.