SOURCE: Vandervlist, Harry. “Nothing Doing: The Repudiation of Action in Beckett's More Pricks than Kicks.” In Negation, Critical Theory, and Postmodern Textuality, edited by Daniel Fischlin, pp. 145-56. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994.

[In the following essay, Vandervlist identifies the repudiation of action as a unifying theme of the stories in More Pricks than Kicks.]

Samuel Beckett's early stories may not appear, at first sight, to share the kind of negative strategies characteristic of the better-known prose works, dating from the trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. Yet his 1934 collection of stories, More Pricks Than Kicks, provides an early example of Beckett's fruitful use of an apparently perverse negative stance: More Pricks Than Kicks repudiates one of fiction's fundamental aspects, the presentation of action. Beckett's early protagonists aim not to act, yet fail to avoid action, and the texts themselves echo this failure, succumbing to something less—but also more—than the simple negation of narration. An impulse to escape the necessity to “do something next” exists from the beginning of Beckett's career and “evasive strategies” similar to those described in Beckett's later prose¹ are in fact at work in the 1934 collection, as I will show by way of a reading of the volume's opening story, “Dante and the Lobster,” supplemented by brief references to other stories from the collection.

In Beckett's early work an outwardly conventional fiction tries both to tell and to deny its stories, finally yielding an indeterminacy Wolfgang Iser describes as “a structure bringing forth—at least potentially—infinite possibilities” (707). There are two levels to such a denial: the level of represented action within a narrative, and the level of the action of narrating. More Pricks Than Kicks stresses the first level, while moving toward the second. No doubt, there is something admittedly preposterous about the notion of deliberately avoiding action. In life, real or represented, the most radical way to shun action is never to have been born; in writing, the pragmatic way to shun action is to leave the page blank. Even Beckett's early protagonists such as Belacqua in More Pricks Than Kicks revile themselves for having failed on one or both of these counts. This anxiety begets characters who strive not to act, and a narrative that cancels itself. Readers may be prompted to ask why such texts, in order to be most faithful to their own sense of the futility of action and narration, might not have been best left unwritten. Yet an action or a narrative that “takes itself back” or cancels itself is not the same thing as non-action, or as a narrative that is absent. The apparently perverse stategies of self-cancelled action and narrative give rise to a third thing, which is perhaps the closest fiction can come to evoking negativity, what Iser names “the ceaseless rejection and denial of what has just been said” (707). Through strategies of negation, Beckett's stories privilege possibility over action, and create a space of unfulfilled potential.

Already in More Pricks Than Kicks, then, Beckett explores an impulse to evade the element of mythos—the mimetic representation of human action—and to deny the grounding aspects of figuration, empirical representation, and allusion.² However, where the later texts fragment and hollow out the surface of the text itself, the earlier work uses its protagonist to enact such a process within a (reluctantly) represented world. In More Pricks Than Kicks we can see the struggle against the presentation of action in Beckett's very choice of a protagonist, for the protagonist of the stories is not invented but chosen, purloined from Dante. We see it also in the narrative shapes of these stories, with their elaborate static structures of undermined allusions, evasive and abortive voyages, missed appointments, broken vows, and illusory endings.

More Pricks Than Kicks enacts the aimless wanderings of the indolent Belacqua, a character improbably lifted from Dante's Purgatorio and dumped in Dublin where he acquires the surname Shuah. To choose Dante's Belacqua as protagonist indicates Beckett's fundamental lack of interest in More Pricks Than Kicks as a portrayal of action. Dante's indolent spokesman for the late-repenting, trapped in the perfectly circumscribed world of the Purgatorio, can accomplish nothing by his own efforts. His existence is reduced to a long waiting:

Brother, what's the use of going up? For God's angel who sits at the gate would not let me pass to the torments. First must the heavens revolve around me outside it, so long as they did during my life, because I delayed good sighs until the end—unless prayer first aid me which rises from a heart that lives in grace. …

(Purgatorio 43)

Dante's Belacqua dramatizes Geworfenheit, the condition of being thrown into being: he is unready for his second “birth” into Purgatory, unprepared by repentance, unsuited to any effective existence there. Belacqua is a type of the ironic character, in Frye's sense of being limited in power and scope (34), useless to all but the most perverse builder of narratives. He does nothing, he has no power to do anything, he does not belong in the world in which he finds himself. He has next to no history. In his life he did almost nothing: in his death he is condemned to do absolutely nothing.

Dante's Belacqua awaits a progression toward an absolute which is merely postponed. He waits, as Walter Strauss puts it, “in eternity, but not eternally” (252). Beckett's Belacqua, though, waits in an absolute absence of the absolute. Beckett, then, has recast a hiatus in Dante's progressive narrative, and turned this static moment into an entire narrative event. Dante's Belacqua provides a provocative opportunity for Beckett: here is a protagonist who can only do nothing for the present lifetime, whose story is to be without a story. He embodies the stasis that Joyce's Stephen Dedalus associates with the response to art. Belacqua offers the writer a perversely inactive protagonist who subverts the whole game from the outset.

The narrative structures of the stories in More Pricks Than Kicks further illuminate Beckett's interest in the possibility of a fiction that negates the necessity of action. “Dante and the Lobster” illustrates the sort of narrative movement typical of these stories. The story's opening image is one of doubled immobility. Belacqua, reading Dante's Purgatorio, is immobile both physically and mentally: “It was morning and Belacqua was stuck in the first of the canti in the moon. He was so bogged that he could move neither backward nor forward” (9). Belacqua is saved from “running his head against this impenetrable passage” (9) by the striking of a clock which signals midday. It becomes clear that the progress of Belacqua's daily itinerary is governed not by accomplishments, but by the cycle of clock time and the enactment of rituals. Noon strikes and Dante is punctually abandoned: the passage of time does not resolve the enigmas of Dante, but it does allow Belacqua to feel he is moving on. Belacqua's attitude to clocks and time is as contradictory as his feeling about movement in space: eventually he “would not tolerate a chronometer of any kind in the house” and for him “the local publication of the hours” becomes “six of the best on the brain every hour” (129). Here, however, the striking clock temporarily permits him to think himself freed from futility and inaction.

Belacqua orders his day according to considerations of “what he had to do next. There was always something one had to do next” (10). His immediate obligation is to have lunch—and this is not merely a matter of locating and ingesting nutriment. Belacqua's lunch is clearly a sacred ceremony, and the description of it is one of the most carefully constructed comic passages in More Pricks Than Kicks. Ritual purity is a condition attached to the act of lunching: there must be no contamination by other action; the world must be held at arm's length:

if he were disturbed now, if some brisk tattler were to come bouncing in now big with a big idea or a petition, he might just as well not eat at all, for the food would turn to bitterness on his palate, or worse again, taste of nothingness.

(10)

Belacqua's ritual seeks to avoid this “taste of nothingness.” His sandwich—Gorgonzola, mustard, salt, and cayenne pepper, on burnt toast—is exaggeratedly pungent. But the sandwich is an elaborate avoidance ritual: the food itself is really nothing, the act of preparation everything. And the act of preparation is, above all, not-studying-Dante, not-talking-to-anyone.

Every part of Belacqua's Gorgonzola-and-mustard-on-toast must answer to rigid conditions: the toast must be burnt all the way through, the Gorgonzola must be “rotten.” If all of the conditions can be met, the result will be a comical triumph:

he would devour it with a sense of rapture and victory, it would be like smiting the sledded Polacks on the ice. He would snap at it with closed eyes, he would gnash it into a pulp, he would vanquish it utterly with his fangs.

(13)

The language of this passage suggests a satirical metamorphosis in which Belacqua becomes Hamlet's father or Fortinbras, a conqueror, smiter of Polacks. While this may seem to be one case where allusion grounds a particular interpretation, the result could hardly be less defined, as the allusion evokes one of the most notoriously disputed actions in the canon of English literature. What is it to smite sledded Polacks? Or should that be Poleaxe?³ If, through this allusion, Belacqua becomes a man of action as he eats his lunch, then it is a kind of action that trails off into indeterminacy.

Typically, one strategy available to readers confronting such an elaborately presented non-event is the search for these sorts of seemingly helpful allusions, or the search for an entire pattern of imagery that would imply another level of significance. And apparently no toil has been spared in the effort to build up a ludicrously elaborate structure of imagery and allusions around the sandwich and its manufacture. When this structure becomes (hilariously) excessive, however, its parodic nature is made clear. The Christian imagery of the Purgatorio presumably lingers in Belacqua's mind and merges with the current events narrated in the newspaper spread on the table (and the events themselves reflect the hanging episode in Joyce's Ulysses). Even the name of the paper plays into this structure: it is a “Herald” which Belacqua “deploys” on the table. The main story in the newspaper is that of “McCabe the assassin,” whose “petition for mercy” has been rejected. Belacqua learns this as he eats his sandwich in a pub, after hardening himself against any “petitions” that would interrupt the enjoyment of his lunch.

The condemned McCabe and Belacqua's sandwich are identified with one another throughout the passage, and both are linked to the sacrificed Christ. The slices of bread for toast emerge from “prison” and are sawed off “on the face of McCabe” (11). Belacqua says of the bread that “he would very quickly take that fat white look off its face” (11), personifying the bread and allowing it to merge more fully with the murder suspect. The untoasted slices of bread are called “candidates,” an allusion to the Latin candidus, denoting purity and whiteness, and also one elected or chosen (in this case, as a sacrificial victim). The grocer who supplies Belacqua with “a good stenching rotten lump of Gorgonzola cheese, alive” to place between the burnt slices of toast, gives up the cheese with Biblical gestures:

The grocer, instead of simply washing his hands like Pilate, flung out his arms in a wild crucified gesture of supplication.

(14)

Finally, the punishment of the murderer and the enjoyment of the sandwich merge as “Belacqua, tearing at the sandwich … pondered on McCabe in his cell” (17).

The lunch episode is the core of the story, occupying seven of its thirteen pages. Although it elaborates a structure of imagery which will extend to link the lobster eaten for dinner, with Dante's sufferers, the murderer McCabe, and the Gorgonzola sandwich, the story narrates only the most mundane dramatic events. It is the pretext for a static fabric of imagery and allusion deployed for their own sakes in a parody of master craftsmanship. What is there in the episode that motivates the weighty commentary it must bear? Belacqua's main action—making lunch—is comically inflated by such means as the allusion to Shakespearian “men of action,” then dwarfed by the significances thrust upon it by way of the narrative's elaborately structured imagery. As in mock epic, the banality of the action undermines the seriousness of the figurative freight, and as the image-structure collapses, its implied significance is cancelled. Here, however, it is not the high seriousness of epic tradition which is undercut. Instead, Beckett mocks the imputation of significance to everyday actions through the kind of literary presentation that makes the ordinary epiphanic, and clothes the mundane in a fabric of borrowed symbolism. Certainly aspects of the story echo the three-part structure of Dante's Commedia: the story does evoke suffering, sacrifice, and the struggle to understand their necessity, as well as the triumph of pity. But it is, nonetheless, primarily a recipe for an exotic and pungent sandwich.

The sandwich, in contrast to Belacqua's deliberations over Dante, is a “notable success” (17). Belacqua's day is redeemed by it, and is going “swimmingly” (17) as he arrives at his Italian lesson after lunch. “Where were we?” he asks of his teacher. “Where are we ever?” she replies, “where we were, as we were” (20). It is a reply he is still pondering as he totes home a lobster for supper:

Where we were, thought Belacqua, as we were … [A]nd poor McCabe, he would get it in the neck at dawn. What was he doing now, how was he feeling? He would relish one more meal, one more night.

(21)

Even for those facing execution, “there is always something one has to do next” (10). Relishing a meal, as Belacqua extravagantly does in the story, is one such thing, but behind it is a strong sense of futility, of avoiding something—the passage of time, and, ultimately, death—to which a reply is impossible. Success, for Belacqua and for More Pricks Than Kicks, means filling plot-time and text-space with something approaching non-action, or at least with a kind of self-consuming action described in ways that both assert and retract significance.

That point is reconfirmed in Belacqua's second meal of the story, the lobster. Surprised, he cries out when he unwraps his lobster, “My God … it's alive, what'll we do?” (This is, after all, how Beckett's characters generally react to the unwelcome surprise of their own existence.) Belacqua's aunt does what one does next, hurls the lobster into boiling water: “Well, thought Belacqua, it's a quick death, God help us all. It is not” (22).

The story ends with this flat denial from the narrator—“[i]t is not”—made as if “over the head” of Belacqua. Indeed the lobster—“cruciform on the table”—is linked to Christ, as Belacqua's sandwich was linked to McCabe, none of whom, it is suggested, enjoys the mercy of a quick death. Perhaps Belacqua senses that to act, to “relish one more meal,” is to join in this chain of murder which so appalls him. He strives never to move beyond his paralysed question, “It's alive—what'll we do?”

His solution, in “Ding-Dong,” is to avoid doing anything in particular, since he cannot avoid doing. He seeks to balance action and inaction, movement and stasis, in a mutually cancelling fashion. He would enact oxymoron. “Ding-Dong” offers many formulations of Belacqua's self-cancelling evasiveness. For example, Belacqua has a taste for pure movement, which he calls “moving pauses,” or “gress” (38).

Not the least charm of this pure blank movement, this “gress” or “gression,” was its aptness to receive, with or without the approval of the subject, in all their integrity the faint inscriptions of the outer world. Exempt from destination, it had not to shun the unforeseen nor turn aside from the agreeable odds and ends of vaudeville that are liable to crop up. This sensitiveness was not the least charm of this roaming that began by being blank, not the least charm of this pure act the alacrity with which it welcomed defilement. But very nearly the least.

(38)

Belacqua sees this “gress” as an equivalent to stasis. On the one hand, Belacqua is “by nature sinfully indolent, bogged in indolence, asking nothing better than to stay put” (37). On the other, “the best thing he had to do was to move constantly from place to place” (36). While he lacks the funds to roam endlessly “[h]ither and thither on land and sea” (36), neither has he “the means to consecrate his life to stasis, even in the meanest bar” (42). In fact Belacqua “had a strong weakness for oxymoron” (38), and he relishes “a double response, like two holes to one burrow” (42). When he attempts to describe all of this to the narrator, he takes pleasure in the failure of his explanations: “All this and much more he laboured to make clear. He seemed to derive considerable satisfaction from his failure to do so” (43). All of the story's formulations of Belacqua's attempts to enact inaction fail. This very failure succeeds in producing another sense of the double movement of the stories: they both present and withdraw, both clarify and obscure.

The exasperated narrator responds to Belacqua, as perhaps we do ourselves, with the judgment:

he wriggled out of everything by pleading that he had been drunk at the time, or that he was an incoherent person and content to remain so, and so on. He was an impossible person in the end. I gave him up in the end because he was not serious.

(38)

Like its contradictory protagonist, More Pricks Than Kicks is openly exasperated with its own procedures, yet offers itself to readers nonetheless, as if there were no choice but to present the stories in this unsatisfactory condition. In the end, this is a fiction that tries, like its protagonist, to be nowhere for as long as possible.

The text shares with Belacqua an anxious self-directed dissatisfaction, an incipient rejection of its own form. Beckett's fictional procedures enact a sort of evasive narrative strolling, wriggling out of the tiresome conventions of storytelling, enduring the parodic or otherwise humorous “bits of vaudeville” that come up along the way. The result is a self-rejecting fiction, uncomfortable with the way it must feed upon that which it hopes to afflict—the endless round of human action in the world, and its presentation in fiction. The image of Belacqua's enormous boil, treated with comic affection and horror, is an example of the way this fiction turns its characters into grotesques, and is also an expression of its own bitterly ambivalent self-consciousness.

The arbitrary narrative movement of More Pricks Than Kicks parodies the narrator in Joyce's Dubliners, who purposefully roams Dublin in search of epiphanic episodes. In Beckett's narratives, we encounter apparent purposelessness: for example, in “Fingal,” “Love and Lethe,” and “Walking Out” a walk into the countryside ends in a missed appointment or a broken vow. This pattern figures a narratological inconclusiveness or evasiveness that structures Belacqua's and the reader's experience; Beckett's narrator behaves “impossibly” (38), as the narrator of “Ding-Dong” puts it. The reader of Dubliners is offered an experience of gradual coalescence as the stories accumulate to portray the city. Though Joyce's characters are alienated, isolated, and paralyzed, the life of the city is multiform, and in “The Dead” one senses a general tone of culmination and of charity towards the represented world. The levelling of the living and the dead under the general covering of snow may suggest the frozen, paralyzed life of the city and nation, but it may also imply (positive) continuity between past and present, a sense of community. In any event this ambivalence ought not to be discounted. Either alternative offers a totalizing view of the story which satisfies, as Iser states, “an expectation we all have about the meaning of works of art: that meaning should bring the resolution of all the disturbances and conflicts which the work has brought into being.” Iser points out, however, that “this view of meaning constitutes an historical but by no means normative expectation, and Beckett … is concerned with a very different sort of meaning” (715).

More Pricks Than Kicks struggles to be a different kind of fiction and offers no such coalescence. What Iser writes of Beckett's trilogy applies to More Pricks Than Kicks as well:

in this narrative process we experience an increasing erosion of what we expect from a narration: the unfolding of a story. This expectation is actually encouraged by the many fragments of stories, but these serve only to show up the narrative process as one of continual emptying out.

(713)

Fragmentation and hollowing out are embodied in the figure of Belacqua. If More Pricks Than Kicks tolerates any “inscription” on its digressive, evasive “pure blank movement,” it is the inscription of Belacqua's disintegration. Beginning with his identification with the lobster, first “crucified,” then tossed into a pot of boiling water, the stories trace Belacqua's disintegration either directly or, in the later stories in the collection, by proxy in the death or disablement of his spouses. At the hospital he is to undergo a double amputation—of his great toe and of the “baby anthrax” on his neck. He requests that the severed toe be given to the cat, thus paralleling what was almost the lobster's fate. The image of dispersion, of a body-in-pieces, is the state to which Belacqua has ultimately regressed, before a negligent anaesthetist confers upon him his abrupt, arbitrary end. Thus “the perpetual effort to retract what has been stated” (Iser 717) plays itself out physically as well.

We might echo Dante's Belacqua, and ask of such a narrative, “Brother, what use … ?” More Pricks Than Kicks refuses many of the conventional pleasures of narration—a sense of linear direction, the satisfaction of a journey accomplished, the epiphanic “discovery” of coherences. Beckett's stories clearly address readers who are schooled in these pleasures, but who are able to undo their delight and enjoy the irony of a narrative that unexpectedly rejects them. A different kind of pleasure results from the surprise and humour evoked when these “impossible” stories reveal the conventional nature of “possible” and gratifying narratives.

So does More Pricks Than Kicks merely allow us to see that purposeful and complete narratives make something out of nothing, imposing, perhaps, their structures and their completeness? If so “the time and energy spent [reading them] … would be out of all proportion” (Iser 716). Does More Pricks Than Kicks in turn seek to make nothing out of something? Or simply to avoid making something? That isn't the case either, since we have the stories to read and comment upon. By either set of criteria, then, the stories fail. Belacqua's quest to “be nowhere for as long as possible,” to make of his story a blank sheet, is always frustrated by “inscriptions.” What are the implications of this double negative, the desire to evade narrative and the failure of this evasion? The accomplished incompetence of Beckett's protagonists, and of their narratives, develops beyond the point of merely undoing expectation. More Pricks Than Kicks shows, twenty-two years before Beckett gave the idea a clear formulation in Three Dialogues, the struggle to construct the minimal artistic expression. In the collection Beckett outlines the situation of an artist for whom “there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express” (103). Belacqua's relation to action is the same as that of Beckett's relation to expression.

More Pricks Than Kicks is an early manifestation of Beckett's attempts to reduce fiction to the paradoxical presentation of no one, nothing, nowhere, a negative complement to the vision of everyone, everything, everywhere, evoked in Joyce's Finnegans Wake. If Finnegans Wake gains its encyclopedic scope by multiplying the possibilities it affirms in each of its sentences, words, or syllables, then Beckett's characters and narratives demonstrate an inverse procedure. For Belacqua, and later Murphy and others, not to act is a way of keeping all possible alternatives intact, in the realm of pure potential. To preserve the idea of potentially infinite possibilities Beckett's protagonists refrain from acting.

Beckett “constantly takes language at its word, and as words always mean more than they say, all statements must be qualified or even cancelled” (Iser 715). Beckett's narratives cancel themselves to avoid saying more than they mean, and thus open up the enormous indeterminate possibilities of meaning. In employing these strategies, More Pricks Than Kicks activates the “play of negativity” Iser sees in the later prose, in which “finiteness explodes into productivity” (718). We must be careful, however, not to mistake this productivity for action: it is an endless production of discourse, and an endless production of the self by the negative strategy of stating, cancelling, and then further cancelling the seemingly positive act of correcting an error. All of these strategies issue from a source who, like Dante's Belacqua, is going nowhere. Georg Lukács, in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, castigated Beckett for presenting an endless abstract potential that is never realisable, that goes nowhere and does nothing (66). Beckett's fiction implies that if we think we are going somewhere or doing something, it is always in fiction, within those necessary fictions that allow us to act. In the unspeakable space outside these necessary fictions, however, we remain like Belacqua, “where we were, as we were.”

A text like More Pricks Than Kicks ultimately demands an inversion of the hierarchy that sees action as more interesting and more meaningful than inaction. Beckett's early novels, in their radical skepticism about action and meaning, in their flight from the rewards and the necessary illusions of a masterful competence, ruthlessly present us with an emptiness where we are conditioned to find the utopia of artistic coherence and wholeness. This fiction exposes the involuntary nature of our attempts to see this utopia as merely deferred, but still recoverable, so that our helpless insistence that “this must mean” becomes comically repetitive. In the end, Beckett places his readers in the same position as his protagonists, and we become the victims rather than the masters of meaning. More Pricks Than Kicks anticipates the motif of the inescapable and thus compulsory meaning which the text seeks hopelessly to elude, through the protagonist's similarly hopeless evasion of action. Beckett's later works will refine their focus upon the compulsory aspect of meaning, and place it at the level of the act of narration itself. Belacqua, an actor rather than a narrator, struggles to avoid “doing something next,” yet can only cancel or repudiate the actions he cannot help but perform. Molloy, Malone, and others will struggle to end their narration, and succeed only in producing more narrative, more words that “mean to mean,” in spite of the qualifications, cancellations, and repudiations attempted by those who speak them.

Notes

1. Two of these strategies, the denial of figuration and evasion of allusion, have already been described in the later work by Wolfgang Iser and Shira Wolosky.

2. Frye uses mythos to refer to a work's narrative element, the representation of action as opposed to dianoia, the representation of thought (52-53).

3. See, for instance, Harold Jenkins' two page note on this “much-disputed phrase” in his edition of Hamlet (425-27).

Works Cited

Aligheri, Dante. The Divine Comedy: Purgatorio. Tr. Charles S. Singleton. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1973.

Beckett, Samuel. More Pricks Than Kicks. N.Y.: Grove Press, 1972.

———. Proust. Three Dialogues. London: John Calder, 1965.

Frye, Northrop. The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957.

Iser, Wolfgang. “The Pattern of Negativity in Beckett's Prose.” The Georgia Review 29 (Fall 1975): 706-19.

Joyce, James. Dubliners. N.Y.: Viking, 1969.

———. Finnegans Wake. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.

Lukács, Georg. The Meaning of Contemporary Realism. London: Merlin Press, 1963.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Harold Jenkins. London: Methuen, 1982.

Strauss, Walter. “Dante's Belacqua and Beckett's Tramps.” Comparative Literature 11. 3 (Summer 1959): 250-61.

Wolosky, Shira. “Samuel Beckett's Figural Evasions.” Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory. Eds. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser. N.Y.: Columbia UP, 1989: 165-89.