12. Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable (1951–1958)

This chapter situates Samuel Beckett’s so-called ‘trilogy’ of novels, Molloy, Malone meurt/Malone Dies and L’Innommable/The Unnamable, in the context and chronology of his entire oeuvre. Special attention is paid to the periodization of his work into an early, middle and late period, and the ‘watershed’ status of the three novels, in addition to Beckett’s habit to self-translate his bilingual work after he adopted French as a second language of composition. Although he disliked the term ‘trilogy’, Molloy, Malone meurt/Malone Dies and L’Innommable/The Unnamable are closely connected through Beckett’s fascination with linguistic skepticism, as well as their shared focus on denarration and undoing, which increasingly disintegrates the traditional notions of character and fictional universe. Beckett’s characters and story worlds are quite different from what he dismissed as the ‘clockwork cabbages’ and ‘chloroformed world’ of Honore de Balzac, whose programmatic writing style Beckett did not appreciate. Judging from the manuscript notebooks of his own novels, Beckett experimented with a more processual form of composition that self-reflexively thematizes incompletion, closely resembling what H. Porter Abbott has termed ‘autography’. These characteristics earned Beckett the praise of such early prominent commentators as Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille. Subsequent generations of critics have focused on the novels’ relationship to postwar notions of humanity and the dominant philosophy of existentialism, followed by political and often heavily theorized readings in the 1980s and 1990s. Since then, the range of critical perspectives has only continued to broaden, including an archival field of study. The openness of Beckett’s ‘trilogy’ to such a variety of approaches is precisely what makes it such a vibrant part of his work today.