After L’Innommable Beckett found himself at an impasse. In a letter to Aidan Higgins in February 1952, Beckett indicates that the novel marks an endpoint in his writing, ‘there being nobody left to utter and, … nothing left to utter about’ (LII 318).Footnote ¹ L’Innommable ‘seems about the end of the jaunt as far as I am concerned’, he asserts.Footnote ² Just over a week later, writing to Bram and Geer van Velde’s sister, Jacoba van Velde, Beckett elaborates on his predicament: ‘I haven’t been able to do anything since L’Innommable. It’s the bottom of the barrel. Perhaps you’ll understand why when you read it. I twist and turn, but to no purpose’ (LII 321).Footnote ³ These twistings and turnings would become Beckett’s thirteen Textes pour rien, short prose pieces ‘torn off the placenta of L’Innommable’,Footnote ⁴ begun, in fact, over a year before those letters were written.Footnote ⁵ In addition, Beckett undertook freelance work, translating Octavio Paz’s Anthology of Mexican Poetry for UNESCO, and Georges Duthuit’s study Les Fauves. He was also reading and translating Maurice Blanchot’s work, an interest which began in 1948 when Duthuit sent him one of Blanchot’s articles.Footnote ⁶ By 1950 Beckett had read Blanchot’s Lautréamont et Sade (1949), commenting that there are ‘some very good things in it. A few tremendous quotations that I did not know, in the style of the one I knocked up for you from the 120 Days. Hard to single out one passage to translate, but I managed to and started on it’ (LII 211).Footnote ⁷ Beckett began to translate Blanchot’s book, announcing to Duthuit on 3 January 1951: ‘I have finished the Blanchot. It makes 12 pages of text. Some excellent ideas, or rather starting points for ideas’ (LII 219). Beckett had also read Blanchot’s collection of essays Faux Pas, discussing with Duthuit whether it would be wise to include a translation of Blanchot’s introduction, ‘From Anguish to Language’, in the journal: ‘I think it would be right to leave the foreword to Faux Pas, which could really only go out as separate aphorisms, in another issue’ (LII 219)

Beckett’s interest in the Marquis de Sade goes back to the early 1930s. Laura Salisbury reminds us that Beckett may have first encountered Sade in 1931 when he was reading Mario Praz’s The Romantic Agony, and Shane Weller notes Beckett’s reference to ‘Sadism’ in his 1930–31 lectures on Racine (Salisbury Reference Salisbury2012, p. 71; Weller Reference Weller and Smith2008, p. 108). In a rich and oblique letter to Thomas McGreevy dense with reference and allusion (in which Beckett analyses the importance of Cézanne’s painting) he quotes Sade from La Nouvelle Justine ou, Les Malheurs de la vertu (1797), asking if there could be ‘any irritation more mièvre than that of Sade at the impossibilité d’outrager la nature’ (LI 223).Footnote ⁸ Four years later Beckett was on the point of accepting a commission from Jack Kahane, founder of Obelisk Press in Paris, to translate Sade’s Les 120 Journées de Sodome, ou l’école du libertinage (1785). Beckett was ambivalent about the commission. Though the money was good – 150 francs per 1,000 words – and he had a longstanding interest in the author, he was concerned about how being known as the translator of Sade would reflect on his reputation as a writer. On the 11 February 1938 Beckett outlined his dilemma to McGreevy: ‘Though I am interested in Sade & have been for a long time, and want the money badly, I would really rather not’ (LI 605). He expresses the same dilemma in a letter to George Reavey of 20 February 1938: ‘I should like very much to do it, & the terms are moderately satisfactory, but don’t know what effect it wd. Have on my lit. situation in England or how it might prejudice future publications of my own there’ (LI 604). Nonetheless, he acknowledges Sade’s book as ‘one of the capital works of the 18th century’ (LI 604). The next day, on 21 February, in a letter to McGreevy, he describes Les 120 Journées de Sodome in terms of a counterpoint between descriptive excess and structural rigour, a tension which is evident in much of Beckett’s own writing, particularly Watt and How It Is: ‘The obscenity of surface is indescribable. Nothing could be less pornographical. It fills me with a kind of metaphysical ecstasy. The composition is extraordinary, as rigorous as Dante’s’ (LI 607).Footnote ⁹ Beckett returns to Sade in the early 1950s. On Monday, sometime around 8 January 1950, Beckett writes to tell Duthuit that he has translated four letters by Sade, taken from an edition by Gilbert Lely (LII 222). On the recommendation of Duthuit, Beckett reads, and translates parts of, Pierre Klossowski’s Sade mon prochain and Maurice Heine’s collection of essays Le Marquis de Sade edited by Gilbert Lely (LII 225):Footnote ¹⁰ ‘I have finished the Heine and started translating the foreword to the Dialogue entre un prêtre et un moribund, a text by Sade’, though Beckett finds Klossowski’s writing ‘incomparably woolly rubbish’ and concludes that, of these writers mentioned, ‘Blanchot is by far the most intelligent’ (LII 225).

Blanchot’s readings of Sade illuminate, in striking ways, Beckett’s poetics. In ‘Insurrection, the madness of writing’, L’Entretien infini (1969), Blanchot searches out the impulse behind Sade’s work. Stripping away the narratological moment and the moral context out of which the acts described in Sade’s writing emerge – ‘the blasphemy to be uttered, the evil to be exhalted, the criminal passions to be sustained’ – Blanchot identifies fundamental exigencies in the eighteenth-century writer’s work: the obligation to say everything, to speak the unspeakable and to write with a compulsion and repetitive force that cannot be stopped. In terms that bring to mind the urgencies of both The Unnamable and Not I, Blanchot describes the ‘irreppressible necessity of [Sade’s] writing’, describing it as ‘a terrifying force of speech that would never be calmed. Everything must be said’ (Blanchot Reference Blanchot and Hanson1993, p. 220). While subject to an imperative to say everything, Sade also ‘says all that is not to be said and recommends the unspeakable’ (Blanchot Reference Blanchot and Hanson1993, p. 221). Blanchot describes Sade’s writing in terms of a ‘frenzy’, a ‘violence that cannot be either exhausted or appeased’, the ‘excesses of a superb and ferocious imagination’, yet this imagination is not in control of language (Blanchot Reference Blanchot and Hanson1993, p. 221).Footnote ¹¹ On the contrary, it is ‘always inferior to the transports of a language that will not tolerate stopping’ (Blanchot Reference Blanchot and Hanson1993, p. 221). There is no law that can arrest the impulse of Sade’s writing; the ‘repetitive force’ of his narration ‘encounters no interdict’ (Blanchot Reference Blanchot and Hanson1993, p. 221). The Beckettian poetic is, however, quite different to that of Sade in this regard. Beckett’s writing is subject to an interdiction that obliges, controls and passes judgement on those who speak in his work. In her article ‘Samuel Beckett, Lecteur de Sade: Comment c’est est Les Cent vingt journées de sodome’ Elsa Baroghel articulates the complex differences between Beckett and Sade, arguing that in Beckett’s world ‘the philosophical stability and the implacable logic that Sade claims is precarious, continually threatens to draw into its fall the illusion of the unity of the subject’ (‘la stabilité philosophique et la logique implacable dont Sade se réclame sont branlante, risquant en permanence d’entraîner dans leur chute l’illusion de l’unité du sujet’) (Baroghel Reference Baroghel and Brown2016, p. 133).

Blanchot describes the Sadean narrative in terms that recall Beckett’s work: the ‘repetitive force of a narration’ and the ‘monotony of its terrifying murmur’ (we remember here the murmur with which Not I begins and ends) (Blanchot Reference Blanchot and Hanson1993, p. 221). What distinguishes Beckett from the Blanchotian Sade is the role of authority – the rule of law – in writing. Sade’s narration ‘encounters no interdict … because there is no other time than that of the interval of speaking [l’entre-dire] the pure arrest that can be reached only by never stopping speaking’ (Blanchot Reference Blanchot and Hanson1993, p. 221). Sade’s narrative seeks an excess of saying in order to reach the unspeakable. In contrast, Beckett’s narrative is subject to an unknown authority, confined within the parameters of a pensum defined by obligation and impossibility: the agonistics of speaking in order to be silent.

Throughout Beckett’s writing the speaking body acts often as a substitute for the body that suffers the obligation to speak. Weller underlines the Sadean intertext of How It Is noting the direct reference to Sade in part two of the novel – ‘sadism pure and simple no since I may not cry’ (GII 455) – and that ‘the word “orgy” is used in reference to the impossibility of any community that would overcome that radical isolation of the individual which will be affirmed at the end of the novel: “orgy of false being life in common”’ (Weller Reference Weller and Smith2008, p. 110; GII 459). How It Is articulates a logic through which the act of speaking dislocates the speaker from himself, compelling the other to speak for the self. In the novel the body of the other is a necessary site of translation through which the voice without may become the voice within. Both tormentor and victim, the one who hears and the one who speaks, recognise the necessity of this substitution. Each acknowledges the inevitable circularity of their circumstance whereby the tormentor will become victim and victim, tormentor, in an endless chain of substitution through which the murmur of language is translated. The speaking of oneself which is required by the pensum to which the unnamable is subject involves the passage beyond and through the boundaries formed by the tympanum and the skin, which divide the world from the word. It is by passing these boundaries that the speaker of How It Is seeks to speak of himself and to hear himself speak.

The complex aporia of which Beckett writes centres on the silence, the speaker and the self. In order to reach the silence the speaker must speak of the self. But in speaking, the self is always other to itself. The words with which one speaks are always the words of the other. When one speaks it is always the other that speaks. One can never speak of oneself, for even if one tries to speak of oneself, that which one says comes from the other. If one could get the other to speak, to speak of oneself, then self and other would be reunited. There would be no distinction between ‘I’ and ‘s/he’. There would no longer be an obligation to speak for there would no longer be the voice of the other forcing one to speak. There would only be silence.

In The Unnamable Beckett describes this paradox through the voice of a speaker who vacillates between self and other, who is both and neither. This voice traces a line between inside and outside, and forms the tympanum through which the voice of the other comes to the self. The tympanum is the membrane which both receives and gives birth to the voice. It circumscribes the limit and boundary of the body through which the voice must pass in order that it may be spoken. It engenders the speech which, in Beckett’s work, is always a citation. In How It Is Beckett enacts this paradox through the voice of the speaker, who attempts to speak of itself through the other, but cannot since the words which it forces the other to speak are already the words of an other. The speaker of The Unnamable describes the pensum under which he labours as a ‘Strange task, which consists in speaking of oneself’ (U 27; GII 305). At the close of the novel the speaker specifies the complexities of this obligation and the relationship it demands between self and other:

The ‘I’ who becomes the absentee in speech must get the ‘he’ to speak. If the third person can speak for the first, then the pensum given to the unnamable will be discharged and the frantic speaker of The Unnamable can be silent. By speaking of the other, or speaking the other, the distance between self and other is resolved. However, the unnamable’s solution to the problem posed by his pensum, as we see in How It Is, and later in What Where, is not a simple procedure, producing works that are ‘endowed with … uncompromising violence’ (Hill Reference Hill2010, p. 10).

The ear of The Unnamable becomes the entire body of How It Is. The tympanum that translates the murmur of the voice into words in The Unnamable becomes the skin through which the voice must pass in How It Is. The body of How It Is is not a vehicle for the transmission of the word. Rather, it is the space in which the unintelligible, indistinguishable murmur of language is embodied and translated and produced. Within this space language makes sense: through the body language is spoken. The text of How It Is pierces the membrane that distinguishes between self and other, between the voice without and the voice within. This membrane is the skin of the other that the narrator parts in his attempts to force the other to speak, and in so doing eliminates the distinction between self and other. The elimination of the distinction between the body of the narrator and the body of the other gives voice to the other. But what kind of voice is this? Does it fulfil the obligation with which the unnamable was burdened? Perhaps not, for the words which the narrator forces the other to speak are not his own words. They come to him as the words of an other. How It Is is an enactment of the desire to speak of oneself with one’s own words and to abolish the distinction between the ‘I’ and the other which the utterance of those very words introduces.

The distinction between the ‘I’ and the other is written into the texture of the novel itself in terms of interruption or rupture. The gaps in the text introduce a discontinuity in the narrator’s speech, suggesting that something has been said, beneath the white space of the interval, which the eye of the reader will never grasp. This interruption is the mark of the disjunction between the speaker and the other from whom the words come. In The Infinite Conversation (1969) Maurice Blanchot makes a distinction between three kinds of interruption in language; the ‘ordinary pause’ or ‘discontinuity’ which ‘ensures the continuity of understanding’; the ‘wait that measures the distance between two interlocutors’; and the interruption which measures ‘the foreignness between us’ (Blanchot Reference Blanchot and Hanson1993, pp. 76–77). It is of the latter two interruptions that Beckett writes in How It Is. Though there is only one voice speaking in the novel, two bodies are involved, and it is through the interruption that is integral to the text of the novel that Beckett plays out the desire of the speaker to achieve what Blanchot describes as ‘an immediate relation wherein the same and the other seek to lose themselves in one another’ (Blanchot Reference Blanchot and Hanson1993, p. 77). This immediate relation is to be achieved by forcing the other to speak for the self and thereby ‘making of it its own thing’ (Blanchot Reference Blanchot and Hanson1993, p. 77). Yet in How It Is the identity between self and other through speech is impossible since the Blanchotian interruption interposes an irreducible distance between speaker and spoken which, rather than eliminating the distance between both, further emphasises the ‘separation, fissure, or interval that leaves him [the other] infinitely outside me, but also requires that I found my relation with him upon this very interruption’ (Blanchot Reference Blanchot and Hanson1993, p. 77). How It Is is written from the interval of this interruption. Its words trace a circular and unending movement towards conjunction between the ‘I’ and the other. It concludes with a demonstration of the futility of such a movement and the infinite distance between both as long as the ‘I’ is spoken.

Like The Unnamable, How It Is is a spoken text. The unnamable’s resolve to ‘transmit the words as received, by the ear, or roared through a trumpet into the arsehole, in all their purity, and in the same order, as far as possible’ (U 66; GII 343) is reaffirmed by the voice of How It Is: ‘how it was I quote before Pim with Pim after Pim how it is three parts I say it as I hear it’ (H 7; GII 411). The speaker is not the origin of his voice, he cites the words of another: ‘I say them as I hear them murmur them in the mud’ (H 7; GII 412). The voice that prompts the narrator to speak comes from a distance in time and space. It is a ‘voice once without’ which traverses the speaker with tales of ‘past moments old dreams … and memories’ (H 7; GII 411). It originates beyond the narrator, but takes place within the narrator; it is ‘in me that were without when the panting stops scraps of an ancient voice in me not mine’ (H 7; GII 411). In How It Is the speech of the narrator does not originate in and is not under the control of the narrator. His body is a conduit for this ancient voice which speaks of ‘my life my moments’ (H 7; GII 411). But the telling of this life, the ‘natural order more or less’, is flawed in the transmission (H 7; GII 411). It is ‘ill-said ill-heard ill-recaptured ill-murmured’ (H 7; GII 411). It is a flawed text that must still be transmitted and recorded by ‘someone listening another noting or the same’ (H 7; GII 411). This reference to the reception and notation of the text refers to Krim and Kram, who act as witnesses to the voice:

The interplay between reader and writer characteristic of Krim and Kram is paralleled in the interplay between speaker and listener of Beckett’s novel which is to be read, and heard, between intakes of breath which form intervals common to reader and narrator.

In his study Beckett’s Fiction Leslie Hill analyses the position of the reader of How It Is as one who is ‘not so much addressed by the novel as absorbed into it and is given the task of embodying Beckett’s text as a process of linguistic production rather than interpreting it as a set of meanings’ (Hill Reference Hill1990, p. 135). Hill’s analysis implicates the reader, and concomitantly the author, in the circularity of transmission, recording and production of the voice about which the narrator of the text speaks. The way in which the reader is directly implicated in the subject of the novel parallels the implication of the audience in a piece of theatre. Hill goes on to explore how the text of How It Is is ‘more performative than descriptive or representational. It enacts, in the theatrical sense of the term, more than it recounts’ (Hill Reference Hill1990, p. 137). The theatrical aspect of How It Is is no doubt informed by Beckett’s work in the theatre, and in radio, in the years between the completion of The Unnamable and How It Is.Footnote ¹² Laura Salisbury underlines the connection, noting that the ‘tireless linguistic permutations’ characteristic of early to mid-prose such as Murphy, Watt, Molloy and Malone Dies are ‘strongly reminiscent of the circus or vaudeville gags, such as the famous hat swapping routine that appears in Godot’ (Salisbury Reference Salisbury2012, p. 87). Beckett’s experience of writing for the stage and for radio is evident in the performative style of How It Is which incorporates the rhythm of the spoken voice in the prosody of the written word. John Fletcher tells us that Beckett ‘originally intended to issue his text as a block of words quite unbroken by typographical punctuation marks of any kind, subject only to the breath-pauses of the reader reading it aloud’ (Fletcher Reference Fletcher1964, p. 218). The typographical and syntactic innovations of How It Is cause the reader to echo the speech rhythms of the narrator including those pauses for breath that are indicated by the gaps in the text. Thus reading the novel becomes more ‘a question of performance than interpretation’ (Hill Reference Hill1990, p. 138).Footnote ¹³

On 6 April 1960 Beckett writes to Donald McWhinnie with a few thoughts on a text called ‘From an Unabandoned Work’ (which would become How It Is) that the actor Patrick Magee was preparing to read at the Royal Festival Hall. Beckett is not optimistic about its potential as a piece for performance, advising that the best course of action is to ‘gasp it out very short breath, into a microphone if possible, and hope for the best’ (LIII 327). The letter gives an excellent précis of the novel:

The narrator of the novel is on his ‘face in the mud and the dark’ (H 10; GII 413). He is a single figure, traversing the mud on his elbows with only a ‘coal-sack to the feel small or medium five stone six stone wet jute’ (H 8; GII 412) filled with tins of fish – ‘on my elbow I quote I see me prop me up thrust in my arm in the sack we’re talking of the sack thrust it in count the tins impossible with one hand keep trying one day it will be possible’ (H 8; GII 412) – and a tin-opener which will, as the narration progresses, be put to alternative use. He claws his way through the mud with a measured physicality which resembles Watt’s exaggerated walk: ‘throw the right hand forward bend the right knee these joints are working the fingers sink the toes sink in the slime these are my holds too strong slime is too strong holds is too strong’ (H 21; GII 421). His movements occur at specific intervals, ‘right leg right arm push pull ten yards fifteen yards halt’ (H 12; GII 421), which modulate the intervals of his speech creating the distinctive textual pattern of How It Is. While recognising a former life ‘above in the light said to have been mine on and off no going back up there’ (H 8; GII 412), his world is now circumscribed by ‘the mud the dark I recapitulate the sack the tins the mud the dark the silence the solitude nothing else for the moment’ (H 9; GII 412).Footnote ¹⁴ Binary distinctions trace the parameters of the novel. Distinctions between light and dark, above and below, fact and nostalgia, speech and silence, movement and stasis, self and other, text and absence of text, create layers of contrasts which find their focus in the lines which separate them. These lines form a barrier and mark a passage from which the novel is written. These lines form also a thickness from which the voice speaks. The materiality of his environment has a distinct intertextual resonance with Dante’s Divine Comedy – the mud of How It Is a parallel to that in the fifth circle where the Wrathful endure – as Daniela Caselli observes in her incisive study Beckett’s Dantes: ‘Inferno VII is reconstructed in How It Is/Comment c’est’s painfully detailed exploration of the materiality of speech and its investigation of how repetition and reproduction confer the status of reality upon invisibility’ (Caselli Reference Caselli2005, p. 156).

Beckett’s writing explores and exploits the relationship between the shape and signification of language. He creates a literary structure which generates a tension or pressure within language, forcing it to signify through shape and sound as well as through structural interrelationships. Beckett’s word is ‘at the same time a sign which produces meaning through difference and opposition, and a sign producing intensity through force and singularity’ (Lyotard Reference Lyotard and Grant1993, p. 54). Beckett’s writing works through opposition and intensity. In How It Is this opposition and intensity focus on the body: the body of text which is now visible, now invisible, the body of mud through which the body of the narrator progresses, and the body of the other which the narrator violates. The voice informs all of these bodies. It creates the distinctive textual pattern of the novel in which the recitation of the narrator is broken by pauses for breath:

Voice is a force which propels the narrator along his journey. This journey consists of the recitation of the tale ‘before Pim with Pim after Pim’ (H 7; GII 426). The voice causes the ‘brief movements of the lower face’ (H 7; GII 426) which produce his narration, but the same voice is also dependent on the corporeal gesture which produces sound: ‘brief movements of the lower face no sound it’s my words cause them it’s they cause my words it’s one or the other’ (H 50; GII 442). The voice impels the body to speak even as the body enables the production of this speech. The word is inseparable from its corporeal manifestation. It births itself through the mouth, ‘say say part one no sound the syllables move my lips and all around all the lower that helps me understand’ (H 19; GII 420), but this linguistic emission is also a corporeal excretion, ‘I strain with open mouth so as not to lose a second a fart fraught with meaning issuing through the mouth no sound in the mud’ (H 29; GII 427). The word only makes sense as it is produced by the body. Signification becomes corporeal. The incorporeal word without is made flesh within and becomes a product of the body: ‘I fart and piss in the same breath’ (H 42; GII 436). In How It Is the production of language is intimately linked with the body. While the speaker insists that he acts only as the conduit for a voice which precedes and supersedes him, the manifestation of that voice through the speaker is enacted in an intensely visceral manner. Like a fart, words are an excretion of the body and both have equal signification. Words are of the order of the body. The body which speaks does not so much cause the production of speech as suffer it. The alterity of language, the voice which comes from without, creates a rift between the speaker and his speech but cannot separate the two since without the body there would be no production of speech, no words murmured in the mud.

It is the other which obliges the self to speak, and in this obligation the self is erased. The ‘I’ of the speaker of How It Is is not his own ‘I’. The one who voices the words ‘I quote I see me’ (H 8; GII 412) speaks not of himself but of a speaker anterior to him. The ‘I’ is always displaced. The speaker cannot even recognise himself in his own words for they are the words of another. There is no self-presence in this speech which is the recitation of another whose origin and location are unknown. Here in the world below the light, the world of mud, there is no self-recognition: ‘and no again I’m sorry again no one here knows himself it’s the place without knowledge whence no doubt its peerlessness’ (H 134; GII 502). Knowledge necessitates recognition of the self for without such recognition one cannot take responsibility for one’s own words. Without such responsibility one cannot properly speak of oneself. The urgency with which the unnamable pursues the identity of the ‘I’ and the attribution of the speaking voice is absent in How It Is. Issues of the identity of the speaker, ‘who is speaking that’s not said any more it must have ceased to be of interest’ (H 23; GII 422), and of the coincidence of the speaker with the subject, ‘how I got here if it’s me no question too weak no interest’ (H 23; GII 423), are still unresolved in How It Is.

In part two of How It Is the narrator encounters another body travelling in the mud:

The touch of ownership that the speaker feels on the body of the other is the touch which, through pain and power, brings forth speech from that body. It is this touch which binds these two bodies in a relationship of power that is both visceral and linguistic. The body of this other is perceived by the narrator as inert matter, ‘dumb limp lump flat for ever in the mud’ (H 58; GII 446), which can be brought to life by the actions of the narrator: ‘I’ll quicken him you wait and see’ (H 58; GII 446). This quickening is a linguistic quickening. It is the power of language inscribed on the body. This other body closely resembles the body of the narrator: ‘he’s a little old man we’re two little old men’ (H 60; GII 448). Body is laid against body, ‘my head against his my side glued to his my right arm round his shoulders’ (H 60; GII 448), until they are of one breath:

The long peace is shattered by the sound of singing. This other emits ‘a little tune’ (H 61; GII 449) the words of which are incomprehensible. This body’s ability to speak is proved by a physical investigation which confirms that the sound emanates from the mouth: ‘the hand … encounters the mouth … the anatomy all astir lips hairs buccinators it’s as I thought he’s singing that clinches it’ (H 62; GII 449). There is no intentionality to this speech. The body produces sound but is not aware of its own production. The body which speaks is always other to itself in that it does not recognise its speech as its own. It does not hear itself. The one who cannot speak can hear and the one who cannot hear can speak:

In this passage Beckett raises an important distinction between speech and quotation as it relates to subjectivity. He who says ‘I’ does not speak, he quotes the words of another. He who speaks does not say ‘I’. What are we to make, then, of this utterance of the ‘I’? Saying ‘I’ in How It Is does not constitute subjectivity; on the contrary, pronunciation of the first-person pronoun serves to emphasise the distance between the body who speaks and the subject from which the words originate, a subject which, for Beckett, is always under question. To the ‘one way of being’ (H 62; GII 449), the way of hearing, is joined another way of being, that of speaking.

The narrator cleaves to the body of this other traveller who, while similar in appearance and demeanour, is ‘two or three inches shorter than me’, and possibly younger: ‘I put it down to seniority’ (H 64; GII 451). Narrator and other are both unnamed; ‘no more than I by his own account or my imagination he had no name any more than I’ (H 66; GII 452). The distinction between self and other is confirmed by appellation: ‘so I gave him one the name Pim for more commodity more convenience’ (H 66; GII 452), but unlike Watt, in which the dog is named in order to distinguish it from all the other dogs, naming the other Pim engenders a self-identity which is then reappropriated by the narrator. The other is allowed to accustom himself to the name Pim; ‘he was calling him by it himself in the end’, before that name is reinscribed on the narrator: ‘when this has sunk in I let him know that I too Pim my name Pim there he has more difficulty a moment of confusion irritation’ (H 66; GII 452).

Rather than distinguishing the one from the other, the name Pim serves as a point of confusion between narrator and other. If both are named Pim, what is the difference between them? In How It Is the name is no longer a rigid designator which endures from one instance of utterance to the other. The name does not identify a particular figure.Footnote ¹⁵ In his study of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Rudolphe Gasché asks a question pertinent to How It Is: ‘What, then, is the function of the name, if it has no necessary link to what it designates?’ Gasché identifies the name as the primary announcement of the articulation of language:

In How It Is the name identifies a power relation between two figures. The name is specific to the situation rather than to the person. He who was Pim before he met the other, names that other Pim, and in turn is named Bom by another. Beckett’s choice of single syllable non-referential names in How It Is marks a break from those novels written before The Unnamable in which the names of the characters resound with cultural and linguistic references. Hill underlines how ‘the body [of Beckett’s work], having neither the fullness of presence nor the unity of narrative coherence, cannot be signed with any name that is already available’ (Hill Reference Hill1990, p. 133). The distinctly Irish connotations of Molloy and Malone and the linguistic punning of Watt and Knott give way to the austere simplicity of the single sound of Pim and Bom, Krim and Kram: ‘m at the end and one syllable the rest indifferent’ (H 67; GII 452), a sound which becomes what Duchamp calls a ‘Prime Word’.Footnote ¹⁷ These names do not give any information about their bearers, neither do they identify the same bearer throughout a discourse. They are asignifying sounds which isolate a position within the discourse which can be occupied by any number of figures within a given length of time: ‘nothing changing but the names and hardly they two are enough nameless each awaits his Bom nameless goes towards his Pim’ (H 124; GII 495).

As the figures change positions, so do the names. The narrator names the encountered other, he who will become the victim, with his own name, and is in turned named by another. As becomes clear in part three of How It Is, this name change signals a change in position. The narrator, once called Pim, gives his name to the new victim, and in turn is given the name of the tormentor, Bom, by some other, in a cyclical movement in which tormentor becomes victim and victim, tormentor:Having named the other as victim, the tormentor proceeds to force the other to speak. This linguistic coercion is enacted in a specific and detailed corporeal manner. The rudimentary cries, ‘the slit whence contact with the right cheek less pads than nails second cry of fright’, and screams, ‘I longed claw dig deep furrows drink the screams’, elicited by physical intervention are fashioned into speech by a process of pain and violation (H 58–59; GII 446–47). The narrator forces Pim to speak through a series of lessons. The first lesson involves digging his nails into Pim’s armpit and then thumping him on the skull. The second lesson repeats the first, reinforcing control over the production and limitation of the voice. With practice the cry elicited by piercing the skin of the armpit is developed into a song. Within the first series of lessons the tormentor has gained control over the commencement and termination of the voice, and over the form of that voice. The second series of lessons moves the site of pain from the armpit to the arse and changes the instrument of torture from the nails of the right hand to the tin-opener. Using the same principles and procedures as the first series of lessons, this second series distinguishes between the pain in the armpit which elicits song, the pain in the arse which elicits murmurs, and the pain in the kidney which elicits speech. After much repetition and not a little exasperation on the part of the narrator Pim finally understands what is required of him and ‘instead of crying he articulates hey you me what don’t hey you me what don’t that’s enough I’ve got it thump on skull done it at last’ (H 76; GII 459). Pim’s random articulation signals the beginning of speech. This speech is a visceral response to specific physical stimuli which are refined into a table of action and response enumerated by the narrator:

Pim’s speech is a quotation elicited by pain. Like the narrator who repeats the words which enter through the ear, passing through the boundary of the tympanum, Pim repeats the words which pass through the boundary of the skin. The violation of the skin engenders language. The ‘open sore’ (H 70; GII 455) of the armpit and the ‘open wound’ (H 75; GII 459) of the arse provide a point of passage through which the body of Pim is opened onto language. The body is no longer an object exterior to language, for ‘disrupting the plane surface is nothing less than the inscription of a mark into its hitherto virgin space, the opening of a gap in a surface’ (Gasché Reference Gashé1977, p. 160).

The second stage of this linguistic lesson which Pim is obliged to learn involves progressing from random linguistic utterances – ‘stab him simply in the arse that is to say speak and he will say anything’ (H 79; GII 461) – to a specific utterance. This utterance is the ‘strange task’ (U 27; GII 305) which is required of the unnamable. It is the pensum which has to be both learned and discharged. This pensum involves ‘speaking of oneself’ (U 27; GII 305). It requires that one speak one’s own name. The narrator begins by carving ‘Roman capitals’ (H 77; GII 460) on Pim’s back. With the nail of his right index he traces the letters ‘YOU PIM’ (H 78; GII 461) through the skin to produce a text which is identical to the one we are reading: ‘unbroken no paragraphs no commas not a second for reflection’ (H 78; GII 461). This text is produced by the violent mark of body upon body, as the nail of the index finger is forced through the skin ‘until it falls and the worn back bleeding passim it was near the end’ (H 78; GII 461). The name of the one is inscribed on the body of the other, and, unlike the officer in Kafka’s The Penal Colony who is neither enlightened nor redeemed by corporeal inscription, Beckett’s victim understands the words which are traced through his skin:

The other, who is named Pim by the narrator, recognises this name as his own. This name which once belonged to the narrator is given to the other. The gift of the name from the one to the other, and the recognition of the name of the one by the other, as the name of the other, and as one’s own name, erases the distinction between one and other.

Under the appellation of Pim tormentor and victim become one. The victim speaks the words of the tormentor, words which are inscribed onto his body, words which enter through the ruptures of his skin. At this moment the distinction between victim and tormentor, speaker and listener, self and other, is annulled. The speaker, at last, speaks of himself with his own voice. The voice which is one’s own banishes all the other voices, and all the other names:

At this moment of self-coincidence in which the speaker speaks of himself in his own voice the circularity of repetition whereby tormentor becomes victim and victim tormentor ceases. Self-recognition lasts only a moment, just long enough for the tormentor to drink deep ‘of the seconds delicious moments’ (H 65; GII 451) in which the vast stretches of time are arrested by the body which gives voice. It is at the corporeal instantiation of the voice that time properly takes place. Without this instantiation time is at once both interminable and singular. It is only through the body, through the ticking of the wristwatch on the arm of the victim which is heard by the tormentor, that time passes. It is this body which gives time the differentiation which allows the conceptualisation of the sequence ‘before Pim with Pim after Pim’ (H 7; GII 411). By structuring this novel into three parts which are characterised by the above divisions, Beckett confounds the continuum and the instance of time. The time before Pim is always also the time after Pim. The time with Pim happens at a specific interval, but also happens simultaneously with numerous other identical meetings. The moment of self-recognition at the meeting of the gaze is also the moment at which the tormentor elicits speech from the body of the victim. It is at this fleeting, but ever recurring, moment that the ‘I’ and the ‘he’ who is always other converge: ‘only me yes alone yes with my voice yes my murmur yes’ (H 159; GII 520).

The voice which passes from one to the other through the boundaries of the body, always distanced from itself, comes to rest in the ‘I’ who speaks of itself. There is no more Pim and no more Bom. The points of passage of the voice, from body to body, which these names announce become redundant. The violation of the boundaries of the body which produces this voice interlace the body of the narrator with that of the other:

But can there ever really be this self-coincidence of the voice? Can there be ‘only one voice my voice never any other’ (H 95; GII 473), the voice which, in speaking of itself, can become silent? The words which the narrator forces the victim to speak are already the words of another. Just as the written text of the novel does not differentiate between speech and quotation, so the spoken text of the narration does not distinguish between the origination or repetition of words:

The victim does not speak with the voice of the tormentor for the tormentor himself is speaking under the obligation of another. The narrator of How It Is speaks the story of another and in this story enacts the process by which the other is obliged to speak of the self. But speaking of the self is impossible for each instance in which speech is brought forth is the result of a repetition or a reenactment of speech. Each voice is the quotation of another voice. Tormentor becomes victim and victim tormentor in a cycle of conjunction and disjunction through which the one voice is never ‘my’ voice.

Yet, in How It Is such a voice is impossible for the voice which speaks of itself is always the voice of another. The phrase ‘me Pim’ (H 79; GII 491) establishes an identification between the victim and the tormentor. This identification takes place through the act of writing. It is in writing his name on the body of the other that the tormentor names himself. This naming takes place when the victim speaks the words of the tormentor, ‘me Pim’. But these words are not the proper words of the tormentor for he does not speak, he only quotes the words of another. This identification of the self as Pim does not close the gap between tormentor and victim, between listener and speaker. For in saying the words ‘me Pim’ the speaker posits himself as other to himself. The me who speaks becomes the other who was named Pim. Naming oneself does not lead to self-identity; instead, it perpetuates the cycle whereby the one, the victim, takes on the name of the other, the tormentor, and in his turn becomes that tormentor who passes on the name to another victim.

Pim names an intersection between voice and body.Footnote ¹⁸ This intersection requires the interpenetration of one body with another. It requires the wounding of the body, the destruction of the integrity of the body. From this wound comes speech. The speech through which the name is assumed, ‘me Pim’, is a speech which erupts from the ruptures in the skin which divide the one from the other, tormentor from victim. Through the violation and transgression of the skin, that border which divides one body from another, tormentor and victim become one in language. The speaker and the listener conjoin:

The monologue of How It Is echoes back to that of The Unnamable in which the speaker is marooned in a jar, and in a reciprocal movement the speaker of The Unnamable who rejects the first-person pronoun prefigures the speaker of How It Is who only says ‘I’ through the mouth of another. Like The Unnamable, How It Is is a spoken text. There is no origin of speech. There is only transmission. The speaker is not the author of his own words. He is a conduit for language. Unlike the unnamable, who traces the difference between subject and other, balanced between speech and quotation – ‘I say what I hear, I hear what I say’ (U 130; GII 405) – the speaker of How It Is never aspires to authorship of language. He is other to his own speech: ‘I quote the natural order more or less my life last state last version what remains bits and scraps I hear it my life natural order more or less I learn it I quote’ (H 7; GII 411).

The ‘bits and scraps’ of voice that are forced out of Pim in intermittent bursts, ‘YOUR LIFE ABOVE’ … ‘YOUR LIFE CUNT ABOVE CUNT HERE CUNT’ … ‘DO YOU LOVE ME’ (H 83; GII 464), are like the ‘scraps’ that are forced from the narrator by the ‘ancient voice in me not mine’ (H 7; GII 411) with a coprolaliac urgency. The voice which was ‘once without … on all sides then in’ the narrator is the same voice which is inscribed by the narrator, now tormentor, upon the body of the victim who, in his turn, gives voice (H 7; GII 411). These sporadic outpourings of speech mirror the interrupted passages of text which we read as the voice of the narrator of How It Is. This reflection develops towards a congruence as the narrator anticipates the day when speaker and spoken are one, the day ‘Bom comes YOU BOM me Bom ME BOM you Bom we Bom’ (H 83; GII 464). This is the day when the alterity inherent in the voice will disappear. The ‘I’ of The Unnamable who is always ‘not I’ (U 128; GII 285) in speech gains possession of a voice in How It Is: ‘I’ll have a voice no voice in the world but mine’ (H 84; GII 464). The voice will no longer always be the voice of the other. With this unity between self and other comes a unity between the world above and the world below. The world above in the light which has previously only been present in memory to the speaker who travels below in the mud is now present in vision:

Even though the narrator asserts the coincidence of his voice and that of Pim, he also suggests a distinction between them, wondering whether Pim speaks ‘the way I do part three the way I murmur in the mud’ (H 87; GII 467). With this suggestion comes an emphasis on the transience of the voice, ‘my voice is going’, and the plurality of the voice, ‘it will come back my first voice no voice’ (H 87; GII 467). Yet, it is only the body which can give voice. Without the continuous cycle of bodies interpenetrating bodies nothing could be said, and without this saying there is no story, for

The fiction of How It Is is intimately entangled with the manner in which it is written. The text speaks in the pants and gasps of the narrator who speaks only because he is, like Beckett’s text, being written. The surface of the body and the surface of the page are inscribed by the voice which, without this physical support, would remain imagination.

As part two of How It Is comes to a close Beckett draws his focus away from the intimate relationship between tormentor and victim and introduces two dispassionate figures, the witness Krim and the scribe Kram.Footnote ¹⁹ In a process of repetition and reduplication Beckett rewrites the story of the figure travelling in the mud, sleeping, breathing and fitfully muttering, occupying himself with his sack of tins and opener, from the perspective of the witness and scribe. The ‘I’ of the voice which passes through the bodies in the mud is exchanged for the ‘I’ of the observer. The voice moves from being the subject of the narrative to being the object of the narrative. The observations of Krim are recorded by Kram in three notebooks, one blue, one yellow and one red. The first of these notebooks records the physical movements of the figure in the mud. The second notebook records his mutterings ‘verbatim no tampering’ (H 90; GII 469). The third records the comments of the witness. The voice of Krim as recorded by Kram is distinct from the voice which is embodied in the various Pims and Boms. But this observing voice has endured for as long as the embodied voice, through a series of Krims and Krams which stretch back through ‘Kram the Seventh’ (H 90; GII 469) and beyond ‘the great Kram the Ninth’ (H 91; GII 470). The uninterrupted lineage of Krim and Kram, of which this incarnation is ‘the thirteenth generation’ (H 91; GII 470) attests to the interminable circularity of the relationship between Pim and Bom. The lineage of Krim and Kram is perhaps also interminable for ‘even if I hear thirteen lives I say thirteen but long before who knows how long how many other dynasties’ (H 92; GII 470). There is always the figure travelling in the mud and there is always the observer watching the figure. The voice of the one who mutters in the mud is distinguished from the voice of the one who records these mutterings, since it is ‘not the voice of here’ (H 92; GII 470). The place of Krim and Kram is the place of recording not production: ‘say nothing when nothing’ (H 91; GII 470). Here the voice neither originates nor is transmitted. The voice is removed from the flow of the ‘vast stretch of time’ (H 9; GII 411) and fixed at a specific moment on the physical support of the page of the yellow notebook. But the distinction between recording and production, between the light of the observing eye and the sound of the murmuring voice, becomes blurred as Krim and Kram admit that ‘this voice yes the sad truth is there are moments when I fancy I can hear it and my lamps that my lamps are going out’ (H 92; GII 470). As the lamps which illuminate the figure in the mud wane, the voice which propels that figure seems to become present to the observer. At this moment the place of recording becomes the place of production, a production which is also a transgression:

With this confusion between production and recording, the voice of Kram becomes the voice of the figure in the mud who dismisses the story of Krim and Kram as an interlude, ‘that’s enough end of extracts’, and reasserts his position ‘all alone in the dark the mud and yet’ (H 92; GII 471). Yet while the narrator acknowledges the figure ‘bending over me noting down one word every three two words every five from age to age’, he also dismisses this figure as ‘impossible for the moment quite impossible’ (H 95; GII 473). Is the extract featuring Krim and Kram a narrative separate from the one which is spoken by the figure in the mud? Or is it, like the memories which infiltrate from the world above in the light, part of the story which must be recounted by the figure in the mud? If this second option is the case, then the status of the existence of Pim must also be called into question. The meeting with and torture of Pim might simply be part of the story which is being recounted by the narrator. However, there is also the possibility that it is the figure in the mud rather than Pim who is the fiction for, through the tale of the tormentor, Pim might be describing the means by which he was given to speech. Beckett offers no resolution to these questions. What endures throughout each manifestation of Pim or Bom, Krim or Kram, is the presence of the voice which passes through the boundaries of one body to the other, this voice which is ‘the voice of us all’ (H 108; GII 483).

The longer passages and the increasing intensity of the voice as it strives to finish the second part of How It Is – ‘quick then end at last part two how it was with Pim’ (H108; GII 483) – give way to shorter passages and a sense of relief in part three: ‘here then at last I quote on part three how it was after Pim’ (H 111; GII 485). With a sense of recapitulation the narrator characterises Pim’s journey as a search for unity of self and for a resting place for that self: ‘he sets out to seek out all of him sets out to seek out the true home’ (H 111; GII 486). Pim’s search echoes that of the unnamable who must look for the story in which ‘it will be he, it will be I, it will be the place, the silence, the end, the beginning’ (U 131; GII 406). The unnamable’s search for a place of unity between self and other is enacted through a voice which is always on the verge of dissolution:

The voice of which the unnamable speaks is the voice of How It Is. It is this voice which forms itself from the cries of the body, which is incarnated in one body after another in a cyclical succession through the ‘vast tracts of time’ (H 43; GII 501). There is only one voice. It is always ‘the same voice the same things’ (H 124; GII 495). The voice is incarnated in and transmitted through an unending series of bodies which meet, couple and depart at the same instant:

The logical precision and closed circularity with which these encounters take place is emphasised by the speaker, who depicts the course through which each figure travels as a ‘closed curve’ containing a rough million figures in constant motion, the

The victim who abandons his tormentor travels on to assume the role of tormentor of one other. And the tormentor who is abandoned by his victim does not wait long to assume the role of victim of one other. The tormentor becomes the victim, and the victim becomes the tormentor, ‘turn and turn about’ (Beckett Reference Beckett1976, p. 64).

The moment in which the body gives voice, tormentor and victim become one, ‘glued together like a single body in the dark and the mud’ (H 132; GII 501). This is the moment of self-recognition. In speaking for the self, the other recognises himself as that self. The tormentor sees his own eyes in the eyes of the victim: ‘Pim to speak he turns his head tears in the eyes my tears my eyes if I had any’ (H 83; GII 464). But the tears in the eyes of Pim obscure his gaze and prevent him from recognising himself in the one whom he sees. As Maude avers, ‘blurring in Beckett highlights the physiological limitations of sight, and the constraint the eye as an organ lays on our field of vision’ (Maude Reference Maude2009, p. 87). It is the victim who has the eyes with which to see and to cry, and the mouth with which to speak. Through the body of the victim the murmur which enters the ear of the tormentor as an ancient voice is incarnated as speech. The victim who speaks substitutes for the tormentor who is silent. Here we see the gaze instantiated as a reciprocal modality of response between self and other within the matrix of a split subjectivity, one that will, I argue in Chapter 4, become a central dynamic of Rockaby and Ill Seen Ill Said.

The victim who speaks is not aware of his own speech. There is no intentionality to this spoken word. There is also no originary source for this speech, since each body which speaks does so only under duress and at the prompt of the other. If this is the case, who has the authority to speak? Under whose authority does the tormentor write his text on the back of the victim? Olga Bernal questions the consequences of this lack of linguistic authority when she remarks:

The eternal circularity of substitution in which the murmur of language is given voice through the pain of the substituted body can never lead to self-recognition. He who says ‘me Pim’ speaks these words as an empty recitation prompted by another. He who looks with tears in his eyes can never see his own eyes in the eyes of another, or see the other’s eyes in his own. The recurring couples of How It Is are always front to back, never face to face. In saying ‘me Pim’ the speaker immediately posits himself as other to himself. The victim becomes torturer and the torturer, victim. The name Pim identifies a crossing or intersection between the voice and the body. At this point of contact where body meets body and the voice finds a passage through the open wound in the skin, language is translated from the murmur without to the ancient voice within and emerges as speech. This is the speech that the unnamable identifies as the impossible but obligatory task of speaking of oneself. The aporia at work in Beckett’s writing involves the impossibility of speaking of oneself because in speech one is always other to oneself. The body which speaks is always divided. The ear which hears is always parted from the mouth which speaks. In the act of speaking the couples which inhabit the closed curve of How It Is approach unity, but this unity or self-identity is illusory. The speaker never speaks of himself. He always speaks of the other, in the words of the other. In speech the speaker is always other to himself, and therefore can never reach ‘the silence, the end’ (U 131; GII 406) for which the speaker of The Unnamable longs. There is no end and no beginning, only an eternal cycle of incarnation and repetition in which epistemological certainty is always deferred.