[In the following essay, Doherty provides a stylistic examination of Ping and traces its revisions to gather further insight into the story.]

Beckett's short prose work, Ping, of 1967 is a complex text which presents the reader with many difficulties. In the first place, the sentences which the reader has to confront are daunting in their tonelessness, their fragmentariness and their apparent randomness. Repetition of over-repeated collocations seems to have the effect of neutral counters endlessly shifted in patterns, without the usual comforting illusion of a voice apparently speaking through language and of some kind of a story being told. We seem to have come into a world of language stripped of significance with a slab of text which refuses the conditions of narrative. Readers have grown used over time to a narrative voice which is their link to a shared humanity, and any story which is read is one which takes place in time, and some kind of teleology will take the reader to an “end”, and, equally, the story will engage with some of the small range of human emotions and with a relatively small number of situations and relationships which might be expected to engage a reader's attention. But Beckett's text, at first encounter, seems to be devoid of a human voice and of any human story, to be instead an aleatory dealing out of chance-delivered collocations.

However, many readers from David Lodge in 1967 on, have felt that, after reading the piece with care, some meaning and some human concerns not only emerge, but, paradoxically, are very powerfully communicated, albeit through what seems to be an inhuman and mechanically articulated text. The early conclusion that this was a literary text much like other literary texts, being “like any literary artefact, a marriage of form and meaning”, and that, after close reading, “the rewards are surprisingly great” might still seem worth confronting and questioning.¹

Beckett's short work at first reading seems to discard so much that is necessary for a fiction; it seems to abandon narrator, jettison plot, erase human emotions, limit human actions to their possibly barest minimum, reduce the multiplicity of the created universe to a body in a box in a larger box of a room. All movement (nearly) gone; all colour (nearly) gone; all events (nearly) gone, and nothing left of interest for a reader.

But this is not the outcome of immersing oneself in the repetition of those staccato fragments enclosed between full stops. There is, indeed, something going on within the text which raises important questions about Beckettian narrative and his creative enterprise in short prose works.

In their early bibliographical study of Beckett, Raymond Federman and John Fletcher have an “Appendix II” which gives the texts of Bing and Ping, preceded by the ten variant stages of the French text.² It may be possible to arrive at some clearer understanding of this puzzling text by making use of those early drafts. However, any attempt to come to a clearer understanding by reading through those successive versions carries its own problems when we can only guess at the changing conceptions of the author, and we have to acknowledge too that a critic cannot simply follow ideas or images from beginning to end if a writer's inner conceptions change en route, though using apparently the same words or formulations. Nonetheless, reading the drafts does yield something, however frailly hesitant the reader might feel about claiming to upgrade Lodge into “Some Ping More Understood”.

As the text is problematical in its relation to common expectations of narrative, I should like to begin with the obvious questions about the “Ping” element and with the analogous words which are used in both the final French Text, Bing, and the drafts which precede it. It is important to be as precise as I can about this, as I believe a good deal depends on the use of this word (and its predecessors and counterparts) in our understanding of what Beckett was concerned to express about the creative act and the meaning of literary texts. A careful reading of the drafts of the short text is helpful and instructive, but especially so when we add to our reading a knowledge of Beckett's themes and artistic concerns, and this should help towards some initial understanding of what this kind of emptied, staccato prose might be accomplishing.

The text is plainly a reductionist text, and is something which at first sight seems to be inhuman and devoid of readerly interest, claiming a territory of pure text for its operation. Still, I would claim, it possesses all the elements of fiction, even all elements of discourse, but stamped down to the smallest compass which the artistic abilities can manage for them (‘All I could manage and more than I could’). The questions about who writes and what is written and the ends for which writing exists are all raised by this text. In it we are shown at work a fastidiousness of manner which seems to forbid not only what must have been deemed an excess, but demonstrates a sensibility which jettisons what would previously in classical fiction have been taken as minimal requirements for both creating and being created. To a great extent, this is what Beckett was making his own especial artistic task, a special kind of minimalist writing which, while aiming at existing purely as a text, a construct, nonetheless could never escape the tragedy of the human plight, could never escape from the long tradition that human suffering has its central significance for the artist.

To begin with a simple observation: we have here an example of the Beckettian parody of Cartesian reductionism. We have a situation where, rather than show an attempt being made to build up the whole system of thought and reality from an irreducible and ultimately self-evident “truth”, “je pense donc je suis”, we see attempt after attempt in later Beckettian prose to find ways of reducing all systems of thought and reality to an irreducible minimum, getting as close to absolute zero as can be contrived, getting as near silence as possible and wishing to stay there or end there—and never again to build up a system. For at least forty years Beckett worked his themes of impotence and ignorance, and pursued his art which turned its back on reality, “the plane of the feasible”, “weary of puny exploits, weary of being able, of doing, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road”, preferring the paradoxical state of

The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, together with the obligation to express.³

The problem, of course, is that such a logic would seem to demand silence, a void—and absolute zero yields absolutely nothing. But just how close can you get to absolute zero, how near to silence can you take your art and still be heard? This seems to be the enterprise, and it is emphatically anti-Cartesian, at least in this sense: Descartes's reductionism concealed a sublime confidence and optimism which allowed the fiction of a ne plus ultra, the fiction of a thinking being conscious of itself thinking, where all the problems associated logically and philosophically with such a formulation in language are both embedded and overcome. Beckett's reductionism is always within a given, a formula which defies logic, and which is, literally, meaningless. An urge to write is a donnée. You cannot write without appearing to say something, without in that sense communicating, given that writing means using structures of language (already given) and words (which usually pre-existed the present user), & c.

What this particular text of Beckett's shows clearly, especially when read in its drafts, is that part of the text's complex procedure is to focus on obligation, and it does this by introducing prompting or urging words at a variety of junctures. The text may be said to give a kind of account of a state or situation rather than being a straightforward narrative of events. The reader is given staccato bursts on “how it is”. These bursts, or “reports”, start their textual life as details accumulatively delivered about the precise (?) state of existence of a creature in a situation which is non-real, a situation which for the literary reader will parody other situations which we either knew from experience or from the experience of reading, say, Dante's created worlds of the Purgatorio and Inferno. The details of the Beckett world are progressively but discontinuously delivered. Standard classical texts are content to give “factual” details about the fictional world being created for the reader and then to pass on, and consequently readers would be very disconcerted to find themselves repeatedly being given (as they are in Beckett's text) expressions which might be held to represent “facts” about the physical features of the fictive universe over and over again. Readers would feel that some kind of contract had been broken, that they were being asked to read something that was not “literature”. Such readers would, I assume, give up and throw away the text as “mad”, not worth the time and effort needed to persevere with it. It is hard to be precise about how Beckett does persuade the reader to continue with the enterprise of reading his text, but I believe that he does.

In the first attempt at the creation of this work, the text is organised so that we are gradually led in Text I from a located situation to the “person” within that situation, and the “person” is then systematically presented, moving from the head, through the limbs, cylindrical trunk, arms, penis, feet. The rudimentary “voice” of the piece which has done its best, it would seem, to exclude emotion or genuine readerly interest from itself, does, however, come through to the reader when there is a strong interest shown in mathematics, in figures, but oddly, with a kind of mad precision. Characteristically, after hearing “Largeur un mètre. Hauteur deux mètres”, we have “Mesures approximatives comme toutes à venir”, a voice which is very like the deranged voice of Lucky's speech in Waiting for Godot:

… the dead loss per caput since the death of Bishop Berkeley being to the tune of one inch four ounce per caput approximately by and large more or less to the nearest decimal good measure round figures …⁴

This version of the text seems to have a rudimentary “voice”, shown through what might seem to be a simple and neutrally “scientific” interest in the penis: “Membre glabre. Brèves demi-érections spontanées”. The neutral term “membre” (for membrum virile) might seem fussy and remote from ordinary humanity, and yet the enjoyed rhythm of “membre glabre” is, in its turn, strangely removed from medical neutrality (where “glabre” might be more commonly encountered in expressions like “visage glabre”—“clean-shaven”). Smuggled in, then, against what seems to be the text's “factual reporting”, is a something more, and that “something more” is what, were it sustained and built on might, make the artful. But this interesting “sign of life”—both in the text and in the object presented—might well have seemed excessive, as it is removed from all succeeding versions of the text. All must be controlled, deadened.

Proceeding with its account of the state of affairs, the text seems, much like the earlier novel, Watt, to delight in spending time and energy in an exhaustive and exhausting enumeration of what seem to be the possibilities of the ways in which the several named physical states which are listed may be combined one with another. These states are, it is said, “Non liées”. So: “Chaleur lumière. Chaleur noir. Froid lumière. Froid noir.” are perfectly acceptable as possible states of affairs in a world like our own, but the text gets more from the list than this limited set of combinations. It asserts the reality of

Chaleur lumière et noir.
Froid lumière et noir.
Lumière chaleur et froid.
Noir chaleur et froid.

It can only have these logically possible (but practically impossible) combinations if the rules which govern the meanings of words (or those laws which govern the state of the universe as we know it) are changed. This is implicitly accepted but at the same time is circumvented. What is said to be a state of affairs with all elements co-existing at the same time, is said to be so, but not so at the same time, because these conditions are subject also to the modifier, “Changements foudroyants”. This last qualification might be calculated to persuade a reader that we can have both “light” and “dark” coexisting by the expedient of having changes in the basic states as “lightning-flash-like”. This, then, is a text which tries to remain both within a world which is a possible world which the reader would feel comfortable with and yet within another one which, though mathematically logical within a system of permutations, is practically impossible. It is at this point that the text is punctuated by its first three encouraging or urging expression, “Paf”. This expression is allowed into the sentence without any signal that it might belong to another level of discourse.

This word, which other more standard texts might well have given an exclamation mark to, and which might be rendered as “Slap!” or “Bang!”, presents the reader with initial problems. It cannot exist at the same level of meaning as its context, and it needs, for a full sense of its meaning in its operation its own context and voice. It is a word which has no dictionary definition other than its being noted as a word which accompanies an act. Its reference is beyond the context of the words as they are presented on the page, and it demands to be understood in its own way. It is an alien, and we could allow it into the text only if we had the necessary conditions for its inclusion made plain to us. But no such conditions are ever going to be made plain, and hence it is one of the many sources of puzzlement for the reader trying to negotiate the text.

Readers of Beckett are, of course, well used to his characters being manipulated by outside forces, the reluctant being forced into speech, “quod erat extorquendum”.⁵ So, if we try to associate the usage of the “paf” with some violence, some blow, however unemphatically allowed into the text, however unattached to context and shorn of a voice, then we do land ourselves with problems. These problems which are created for the reader partly derive from the elision of levels of discourse in the text, flattening the plane of the “speaker” or “voice” from which we have been taught by the text's procedures so far how to read, how to try and hear the words, and from which we are used to hearing that which may be believed (or that which we allow, having suspended our disbelief, to count as believable) with another plane, that of a (possibly violent) controller who is demanding from the voice something which the voice and only the voice can give. We would then have a kind of dramatic situation being enacted within the text.

We could go on to observe that any tyrannous demands are met with an incompetent instrument. The “controller” has no articulated language, utters no real word, is present only by inference from the “paf” it might be held to make. It has to use the only instrument which exists to have said what it wants to have said, though it has no control in the end over what is said. The only user of language, the instrument, is the text, and this is worn out, beyond interest, incompetent. The almost exact analogy might be Lucky as “thinker” in Waiting for Godot, where “thinking” is one of his noted skills (like his equally worn-out “dancing”) and is offered as one of the entertainments which Pozzo can offer his guests, Vladimir and Estragon. Presumably the audience is to be appalled that this “thinking” represents what has happened to that capacity which has so often been held to mark man from beast (“What a piece of work is man!”), that “thinking” has been so eroded into this farrago. Again, there are many ways in which the Trilogy tries hard to give an account of this process which seems necessary to be ascribed to a controller or torturer. Of course, to attribute purpose and intelligence, even to a tormenter, is to invent the resolution as part of the perceived problem, to give a spurious meaning to the activity of issuing words to that “issueless misery”. If something is perceived as a task, there must be a taskmaster.⁶

In this text the “Paf”s selem to be there to make further demands on the voice, to stimulate it to further efforts. So, while it is only able to elicit “noir” from “noir” (there seems to be no further intensity of “black” possible, even when the voice seems madly to being urged on to find one), it does manage to stimulate “éblouissement” from “blanc”, and “fournaise et glace” from “chaleur et froid”, but there is no further to be gone than rhetorical exaggeration of what is already elemental, “black, white, hot, cold”. The voice can do no more with what it has got. It might seem that it wanted to escape from the figure, the “character”, to spend some of its energies in the dubious delights of mathematical permutations. But it seems that there is no avoiding the figure and what must be constantly reported about it. And here arises one of the text's central ambiguities. When, driven back to the body and its eyes, the text presents certain details, the reader is unsure of the source of those details. We cannot know whether these details come from a narrator or whether they represent the unspoken voice of the “body”, whether we attribute them to a “creator” or to one we might call the “creature”, or whether it makes no difference which. We might have to come to terms with this truism, that it is a vain question, as all artists can ever really do is to write themselves out of themselves. There is never, according to this view, any real distinction to be drawn between creator and creature. But this is to go too far too quickly. In this text we are presented with this kind of problem when we read the expression, “Brefs murmures de loin en loin”. Does what follows this phrase include something of what the “creature” murmurs; are some of the staccato escapes his? If so, how do we know which ones? Is there a way of knowing?

In standard texts there are ways of declaring voices, of showing differing states of consciousness, of dreaming, of fantasising, of a pre-birth or post-death condition, and so on, and a reader will cope quite happily with a variety of pretended states of existence when the text gives what are perceived as adequate signals, even when such signals are given retrospectively.

There are many instances, of course, but we can think of the fantasy opening of Billy Liar, for instance, and the whole of William Golding's Pincher Martin where we find that we have been reading the contents of a dead man's mind with its fears, hopes, anguishes and terrors. But Beckett's text is dumb.

However, in later versions of the text we do have some help. This is when a decision has been made by the author to use the “Bing” interjection or interruption. We must come to that in its place. But in this first version the possibility is that we do hear some of a voice's murmurs, but murmurs which are endlessy boring for the reporting voice, as boring as the voices of Play: “Toujours les mêmes” … “Ils sont sus.” But one of the possible murmurs which be said to escape could well be the expression

Il manque un échelon.

This would sound very much like a remark of someone trapped who might be searching for a way out, as happens, for instance, in the slightly later text of 1970, Le Dépeupleur (The Lost Ones, 1972), or any of those texts of Beckett which owe much to Dante's Inferno. Looking for a ladder as a means of possible exit has many echoes in Beckett, and yet we know that the possession of a ladder does not carry any entailment that there will be a way out for the ladder to reach. On the whole, human life's evidence would seem to suggest the opposite, adding another part to the generic tragic story of the “vanity of human wishes”. To have a ladder but not to have a way out would be one thing, to judge that you would need a ladder to escape might be another; but not to be able to find any directions, even were you to have a ladder, just because all signs are obliterated, all being reduced to “blanc sur blanc invisible”, so that even were there anything to be found, they could never be found, would be still another. Equally, and very naturally, being human, we can be presented with a total blankness and yet project upon that blankness human needs for shape, balance, symmetry, beauty, order, direction, meaning; and, being human, we will create them where they do not exist. The poet is the maker. But the text here insists that there is “Rien de repérable”, no guidance, nothing from which to take directions. It declares that there is a ladder: “Echelle blanche invisible” … “Dressée contre le mur sous l'une ou “autre niche””. There would be no way of recovering by sight anything which was so described, and it would be no good to anyone knowing that, were he so immobile as he is, and unable to verify even the assertion that there is an invisible ladder there. Standard texts would emphasise pathos or tragedy or irony; we should have some guidance as readers as to how to respond to the situation. To have the human response swamped by a mode of indifferent, even mad, reporting is insupportable. We are given the neutral tones which declare that universal whiteness has absorbed all the colours, aside from the just distinguishable body: “D'un autre blanc le corps à peine”, and in that body a touch of colour left in the eyes: blue, but a blue which is hardly in normal parlance to be allowed as blue at all: “Yeux bleu de glaire”—“blue like the white of an egg”. As only the eyes have remnants of a coloured universe, so only they have the remnants of movement: “Seuls les yeux et encore. Déplacements très soudains et rapides. Tout à coup de nouveau immobile ailleurs.” But there is a final use of “Paf” in the text which damages the apparent indifference and neutrality. It ensures that the eyes are not directed at the presumed controller or prompter. The last “Paf” generates:

A peine les yeux. Paf ailleurs. Vers d'autres traces.

Finally, the eyes are directed “elsewhere” after the blow of “Paf” has fallen, but the voice is reaching its limits of competence, and it cannot give an account of what the eyes are directed towards as completely as it seemed to be able to do earlier in the text. It is failing, and it can only do in fragments what it formerly did more competently (though incompetently enough for the ordinary reader). Beckettian “fatigue and disgust” has set in. However, it is equally possible that the eyes must not be allowed to look at the one who is reporting, must never communicate with the recorder of it all, but must always be directed elsewhere to another reality.

The importance of the interrupting word was increased by Beckett in the second version of the text. Here he crossed out each of the four “Paf's”, replacing them with the stronger “Hop”, at the same time that he was making many other verbal minor changes. I suppose that “Hop” would be seen as a more urging word, encouraging someone jumping, say, to jump quicker or higher.

The third version keeps the basic form of the first two up to the fourth “Hop”; here the eyes are “Hop ailleurs. Vers d'autres traces”. The rest of the text elaborates on the physical states of the elements which compose the scene, insisting on shades of white as the qualities which allow distinctions to be made and discerning to be achieved. But the questions remain: for whom are the “traces” “visibles”? Are the eyes of the body still capable of a minimal discernment; is it a discernment which starts with some kind of distinctness, then, due to its internal inefficiency, witnesses a rapid fading into blankness; or is it the creator who has created such a universe of fadingness, where all is fading into blankness with an inexorability which is the physical lot of the creature. Is this is what is commonly taken to be the state of entropy? Take:

Traces seules inachevées noires jadis pâlies pâlissant gris pâle presque blanc sur blanc ou effacées.

The French allows the “unover” (“inachevées”) traces to be black (once upon a time, having become pale, and then a single blur—presumably represented by the singular form, “pâlissant”—growing paler), then pale grey, then white, or, instead, simply obliterated. What would be the difference? Presumably in the end it would matter nothing; whether a process of degeneration had been managed over time (an unspecified duration) or whether the “traces” had been simply wiped away, the result would be the same. But human stories, conducted over time, are just such events which “leave not a wrack behind”, and it is as though they have never been, and yet memories linger on. Being human, however, all this does mean something to us, and it does make a difference to us. We value history, inherited myths, stories, memories. So, while these “traces” are problematic for the texts, and this version tries to give an account of them, and though this account lasts until the fifth version, they are finally jettisoned, presumably as too resonant, too rich with potential significance, and against the spirit of spareness and desperation which the the text increasingly seems to aim at. But for the moment, we have an evocative image of

Traces éclaboussures larges à peine comme la main humaine lorsqu'un petit œuf s'écrase.

Though these “splashes as big as a human hand and as though a little egg has been smashed” must have seemed too loaded for the text, there is another expansion which continues through the remaining versions and gathers increasing importance, and that is the “murmure”. Here, in Text 3 it starts life as

Bref murmure de loin en loin que peut-être pas seul.

There is no way of knowing whether these “murmurs” are in direct or reported speech, and the elision of the two possible voices is important for the overall exploitation of ambiguity in the text. But the third voice, the voice represented by the interruptive signs of “Paf” and “Hop”, insists on an attempt being made to end the “story” with a more heroic end that simply acquiescing in the existence “amid th'encircling”. “Hop”, “Paf”, “Hop” try to stimulate an ending. The first “Hop” startles the text, which had successfully insisted on immobility and near-stasis, into

l'échelon à la main et paf toute volée mur sol colère sans bruit très bref. Hop de nouveau immobile lâche l'échelon sans bruit qui fuseau roule un instant sans bruit invisible.

This remarkable statement that all of a sudden a hand is on the rung of the ladder and all is gone for a moment, noiselessly (and who or what is “without anger, with a display of anger” is unknown), is again stimulated into its negation by “Hop” as all is still again, with the exception of the telling detail of the noiseless spinning for a moment of the rung of the ladder. In the impossible way of this syntax you have an image which demands both that it be visible in order to be an image, and at the same time to be invisible, and an image which demands time for it to exist, spinning like a spindle, but which is only allowed the barest moment for its existence—and so cannot, by any definition, be held to spin—and an image which demands to be heard, the rung of a ladder rotating in its sockets, but a the same time being inaudible.

The succeeding text, 4, carries on this impossible image of the hand and the rung and its collapse into immobility, but this is the text which first adds “Bing” to the repertoire of interruptive words. It is brought in at the ending of the text where “Paf” amd “Hop” seem to have exhausted their potency. We might therefore see “Bing” as the strongest of the three, and, in a standard discourse might have been said to stand for an exclamatory “smack” or “thwack”. The text brings together the two murmurs which were in the previous text, but puts them earlier in the discourse, with an interval between them, and now reversed:

Bref murmure de loin en loin que peut-être pas seule. Bref murmure de loin en loin que peut-être une issue.

Then we have the new, stronger, interruptive:

Bing murmure. Bing long silence.

The “thwack”, it would seem, can only generate the noun, “murmure”, with no heard content. A further “thwack” yields only silence. Everywhere a law of diminishment operates; stronger and stronger stimulation is needed, but the effects of even the strongest stimulation wear away quickly. You could say, I think, that having heard the escaping murmurs about “perhaps there might be a way out, and perhaps I am now quite alone”, the text is prompted to try and elicit more by increasing the violence which it can use, but unavailingly. But whether it is that the creator can find no more to murmur about, or whether the creature is now beyond torment, it is hard to say. What we can say, unfortunately, is that Beckett certainly would have been able to empathise with those of his friends and acquaintances who had been taken by the Gestapo and tortured for the information which they might have locked within them, so the idea of a series of systematic “thwacks” to generate more murmurs cannot be a comfortable one. The penultimate sentence uses a “Bing” to find a new murmur:

Bing murmure de loin en loin que peut-être une nature.

I suppose that we could find many ways of translating that—“perhaps, after all, there is such a thing as nature”; “perhaps there is a natural world in spite of what I seem to be immersed in”; “maybe not all is artificial”; and so on. But the final sentence leaves the reader with the head where the murmur might be said properly to belong, as a pathetic object in space:

Petite tête boule bien dans l'axe yeux droit devant.

Such is the head which contains the material from which the murmurs are made, and that must always mean the survival of some sort of hope, even when all the evidence directs us to deny the rational possibility of hope. In this case the pathos of the “peut-être” signals what it is to be human. It is human to seek for fellow—creatures (“peut-être pas seul”) when there can be no-one but yourself, to search for a way out of situations which trap or imprison us (“peut-être une issue”), and, finally, when all has faded almost to nothing still to be able to hope that, in spite of all the overwhelming evidence of annihilation, there might still be a system, “nature”, organised by what we choose to think of as its “laws of nature”. That is what it means to be human, it would seem, and it represents another version of Johnson's “Vanity of Human Wishes”, that theme to which Beckett so constantly returned. It is this text's sense of the doomed hope of the lost creature, reduced to the minimum space and almost completely arrested in movement, which leads towards the final horrors of Beckett's tormented presentation of the body reduced to its box, everything nearly obliterated into whiteness, a Shelleyan radiance of eternity where the body's eyes are the last parts of the body for a watcher to observe which have any motion left at all, and yet where this motion and all its resonant possibilities must be denied as nearly as possible. The eyes have to be said to be “hardly”—“à peine”—and their mention usually prompts a “Hop” to make sure that they are directed “ailleurs. Vers d'autres traces.” A taboo exists which must not be broken. So far and no further with empathy with suffering or with humanity. A soured version of the Flaubertian or Joycean artist indifferent to his creation.

The next version, Text 5, takes a step towards further enlarging the content of the “murmures”. The second and third murmurs, “que peut-être pas seul” and “que peut-être une nature”, now have the insertion, “avec bref image”, which is qualified again immediately by “Ça de mémoire de loin en loin”. “Brefs murmures” later brings a “thwack” which is inserted into the text:

Brefs murmures bing de loin en loin seuls inachevés.

And, unusually in the texts, the murmurs all come together, and are then increased by one further murmur—“Peut-être un sens” (later translated as “perhaps a meaning”):

brefs murmures bing de loin en loin seuls inachevés.

avec xxxxxx image. [Que] [p]Peut-être une issue.

[Que] [p]Peut-être une nature avec [brève] image.⁷

[Que] [p]Peut-être pas seul
[Que] [p]Peut-être un sens.

The “brève” has been taken out, and duration is now given in temporal form, but not in our earth time, but rather stellar time, time presumably measured in “light-seconds”:

Une deux secondes temps sidéral.

Thereafter, in this very much longer and expanded text, there is a working distinction to be drawn between the interruptive set of “Hop's” and the stronger “Bing's”. “Bing” is always associated with the murmurs. The text replaces “temps sidéral” before “murmures” by a “Bing”, so that “thwack” will yield murmurs, as when it prompts the first intimation of an actual image, a situation which will be retained in all the succeeding sequence of texts:

Bing peut-être une nature une seconde deux secondes avec image même temps un peu moins ciel bleu et blanc.

This characteristically gnomic and non-specific flash of something from the memory, stimulated by the “thwack” with its generation of “peut-être une nature”, will be the very most (and the very least) that can be allowed in this minimal world. But the text is not allowed to get carried away into the image and its potential; it is succeeded immediately by the doubly urgent “Hop hop”; and the narrative is restimulated into its task and its apparently endless account of the physical situation and its conditions: “le long des murs seul plan à l'infini sinon que non”. As well as never letting itself dwell on what might be taken as the emotional contents of memory or the remnants of feeling, always being prodded into its drained and flattened account of the final conditions of the final body, the text is never allowed to explore the actual cause or determining conditions of the fixedness of the body. As soon as it tries to assign the fixedness to a time or place, then “hop” generates a kind of denial, “fixe ailleurs”—fixed elsewhere. This makes no sense when the text is absolutely precise about the ways in which the parts of the body are immobile, as though sewn together; but somehow the final cause of the “fixe” must always be located “ailleurs”. This refusal to allow the actual cause to be named is strategic for the text, and an insertion in the text at this point of the voice's attempt to assign fixedness seems very significant:

Fixe là de tout temps là où hop fixe ailleurs sinon su que non.

The text reports the contents of the murmurs and yet is prevented from getting too involved with them, showing that there is a kind of contradiction between the operations of “hop” and “bing”. “Bing” stimulates the murmurs, “hop” stimulates the text to carry on enunciating the physical properties and to chart the vanishing of all into a final eclipse into a total whiteness. In one sense we might say that there seems to be a kind of collusion between an apparently neutral report and the murmuring of the creature in its box. This would seem to be the last vestige of the relationship between the creative artist and his creature, just enough and yet too much. It seems that, try as the text will, there is no escaping human empathy, even as the task seems to be the creation of impersonal and mechanical works.

The “Bing” has a range of success from “silence” to a final image which has appeared so often in Beckett (as in the aural images in Eh Joe of 1967 and Krapp's Last Tape of 1960, for example), that haunting image of the imploring eye. This becomes both the triumph of the work of “Bing”, and would in a more pointedly ironic work become the climax of the piece, and there would be no more that could be said after that. But, given the nature of our text, struggling to undermine the nature of the narrative enterprise, and yet all the time confirming it, we have two occurrences of the climatic image, separated by only a few sentences. The separation is enough to do the trick. Prolonged torments of “Bing”s has produced this final image:

Bing peut-être pas seul une seconde deux secondes avec image même temps un peu moins œil noir et blanc mi-clos cils implorant ça de mémoire de loin en loin.

But the tormentor, “Bing”, can do no more with fading realities than stimulate two further murmurs which are qualified deliberately by the insertion of sans image, until the final sentence when the “final murmur” is stimulated, an ironic image nonetheless, even though the text has prevented it from being a climax and has tried to smother it. The text still manages to present the final image in such a way that it will allow itself to achieve some kind of completion, to be “achevé”, and will allow both the tormentor and tormented to rest in peace. We cannot, as human readers, but be moved by this image, conspicuous among so much dessicated and uncaring presentation of the last conditions of the last creature, and we are left with the unresolved image of human suffering pleading for recognition, for relief, and the painful realisation of the impossibility of any such relief:

Boule blanche unie bien haute dans l'axe yeux fixe devant vieux bing murmure dernier peut-être pas seul une seconde deux secondes avec image même temps un peu moins œil embu noir et blanc mi-clos long [sic] cils importants bing silence hop achevé.

This time, alarmingly, the eye is “embu” and in a process of decline. Its state is “clouded” (though Ping translates it as “unlustrous”), but in this text with its diction being kept normally as distant from emotions as possible, apparently, “embu” has a sudden surge of power which it might never have in a less impoverished context. The word, when used of a painting, would mean “flat or dull” (from emboire, “to smear or coat with grease, with wax”), but eyes could well expect to have a different modifier, embué (from embuer, “to dim, cloud—of a glass, etc.”).⁸ Then we should have “yeux embués de larmes”, “eyes dimmed with tears”, a much more pathetic image, of course. It is hard not to feel, when reading the text, that there is a tug towards embué in embu, as we import some of the pathos and heightened emotional charge illegally into this image, occurring as it does in a work so apparently emptied of the human, so seemingly unresponsive to suffering, and yet which includes the unemphasised but genuinely present buffets and blows represented by “Paf”, “Hop” and “Bing”. Yet the text has found its ending, and no amount of prompting from “hop” can do other than produce the “completed” of “achevé” (“all over”). Consummatum est, we might say, irreverently, had not Beckett himself been beforehand with the blasphemy by the opening of Endgame with Clov's “Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished”. But here it is as though there had been a point to this narration all along, but what the point would be would not be known until it was stumbled on, but too late to exploit or explore or put better. Just faithfully trying, in weariness and with failing capacities both of mind and language, to chart the final moments of the final creature, yields the unexpected and unplanned final release.

However, this is no comfort, no consoling moment. We have returned to the condition of light, absolute white, utterly unqualified white (Shelley's “white radiance of eternity”, perhaps, without the “stains”, perhaps), that condition of the divinely created first stage in the Genesis post-void creation of the universe. We have not achieved the complete and final reversal; we have not returned to the void:

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

In Beckett's text all returns to or goes into the blank uniformity of white light, the created which is now the uncreating, almost as in a parody of creation as uncreation, as in Pope's ending of The Dunciad. There Pope had savagely parodied Genesis in his attempt to signal what he saw as the death of civilization and culture in his time:

Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS, is restor'd;
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And Universal Darkness buries All.

(Book IV, 653 - 6.)

Notes

1. David Lodge, “Some Ping Understood”, in The Novelist at the Crossroads and Other Essays on Fiction and Criticism, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971, 172-183.

2. “Variants in the Works of Samuel Beckett with Special Reference to Bing”, in Samuel Beckett: His Works and His Critics: An Essay in Bibliography, University of California Press, 1970, 325-343.

3. “Tal Coat”, Proust & 3 Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, London, John Calder, 1965, 103. First published in Transition, '49, no. 5.

4. “… la perte sèche par tête de pipe depuis la mort de Voltaire étant de l'ordre de deux doigts cent grammes par tête de pipe environ en moyenne à peu près chiffres ronds bon poids …” is the French original.

   We must remember, too, in addition to the many measurements in the Bing drafts, the many instances of computation and approximation in his writing, his fascination with mathematics in general (witnessed by so many of the doodles on his manuscripts, for example), his cultivation of “irrational numbers”, π especially, and the expressed view in Murphy of life as “a matrix of surds”.

5. A famous instance of this would be Lucky being made to “think” in Waiting for Godot, and we should also think of the reported training sessions with Pim instructing him how to respond to the stimuli inflicted with a tin-opener in How It Is, teaching him the arts of communication by torment:

   with the handle of the opener as with a pestle bang on the right handier than the other from where I lie cry thump on skull silence brief rest jab in arse unintellible murmur bang on kidney signifying louder once for all cry thump on skull silence brief rest

   (How It Is, London, Calder & Boyars, 1964, 75.)

6. An idea from Schopenhauer, no doubt, but occurring in many places, for instance in Strindberg's memories of his schooldays:

   It was regarded as a preparation for hell and not for life; the teachers seemed to exist in order to torment, not to punish. All life weighed like an oppressive nightmare, in which it was of no avail to have known one's lessons when one left home. Life was a place for punishing crimes committed before one was born, and therefore the child walked about with a permanently bad conscience.

   (Quoted in L. Lind-Af-Hageby, August Strindberg: The Spirit of Revolt: Studies and Impressions, London, Stanley Paul & Co., 1913, 28.)

7. “Typescript matter in the original is printed here in normal roman characters; manuscript additions are printed in italics. Matter struck through is enclosed within square brackets, and, where this is illegible, a series of x's gives some guidance as to the extent of the erasure.” (Federman and Fletcher, 324.)

8. This image is perhaps somewhere in the background to Beckett's last, moving poem recorded for The Great Book of Ireland, and written out three weeks before his death in December, 1989:

   Redeem the surrogate goodbyes
   who have no more for the land
   the sheet astream in your hand
   and the glass unmisted above your eyes.