The stylistic shift between the pre-war and the post-war Beckett is also a shift away from the influence on Beckett of James Joyce as mentor, friend and literary father figure. Beckett had written about Joyce, and had translated him into French. So one notion is that, by using French as his working language, Beckett could begin to find a new language, one that could exist beyond Joyce’s long shadow. In his pre-war work Beckett employs a neologism, like wholehogs, in a clear nod to Joycean language games, and words like knighterrant and corpseobedient are scattered throughout Murphy. Beckett was well aware that his writing style too obviously leant on the master’s, and in spite of what he had termed Joyce’s ‘heroic achievement’ he ‘realised that [he] couldn’t’, as he said, ‘go down that road’. His task was rather to find a way to imbue his work ‘with his own odours’ (see Knowlson, 1996: 105, 160).
Here, by way of contrast, is a short passage from Molloy, an English text from a French original:
To be literally incapable of motion at last, that must be something! My mind swoons when I think of it. And mute into the bargain! And perhaps as deaf as a post! And who knows as blind as a bat! And as likely as not your memory a blank. And just enough brain left intact to allow you to exult! And to dread death like a regeneration.
(Beckett, 1951 [1955]: 134–35)
The Joycean flourishes have been ironed out; humour remains, but it is in the service of a drive towards nothing, towards a darkness that cannot be afforded the comforts of death; a suffering from which – in spite of the deafness, the lack of vision and the inability to speak – one is never allowed an escape. The compulsion to write, to chronicle the materiality of the void, is all that’s left; an exultation not of joy, but grim determination. Beckett is aware, in the period when he starts to write in French,