"Reduce, reduce, reduce!" wrote Marcel Duchamp, proclaiming a new credo for artistic composition. Beckett has taken the manifesto at its word, for in his short prose pieces to construct means quite literally to reduce. Ideas collapse into words, contemplation backslides into sensation, and stories revert to color, texture, sensibility, and sensuality. Definitively incomplete, Beckett's formal condensation undermines the elusive and sometimes suspicious relations between his minimalist prose and all other things: "Objects give us everything," Duchamp continued, "but their representation no longer gives us anything." Disengaged from representational imagery and therefore not emblematic, Beckett's work makes us discover in residual prose the literary potential of compressed and frequently abstract patterns, their human overtones, their fleshy colors, and, above all, their pervasive texture of "mucous membrane."

As early as Imagination Dead Imagine Beckett offers us a story without the intrusion of any proper subject: "No trace anywhere of life, you say, pah, no difficulty there, imagination not dead yet, yes, dead, good, imagination dead imagine. Islands, waters, azure, verdure, one glimpse and vanished, endlessly, omit." Beckett asks his reader to imagine a totally white world in which imagination itself has finally died…. Concentrating on images drawn, abstracted, and metamorphosed from nature, Imagination Dead Imagine celebrates an imaginative vision that is concrete and sensual and anything but dead. Creating through reduction a white world existing in some fourth dimension of non-Euclidean geometry, Imagination Dead Imagine confronts us with its own uneasy presentness. As readers we become obsessed with the materialization of this precise illusion, its menace and its progressive validation. Beckett transforms imaginative vulnerability into imaginative power. Though his language here has no range of application and meaning authorizing us to make a subtext from the text we read, it makes a shocking immediacy out of incompleteness and instability. Central to the composition is consistency, not symbolism. The story is concerned solely with linking its own absolute qualities, its own inner vitality and definiteness, within the limits of its small boundaries. The evocative force of Imagination Dead Imagine makes no appeal to any reality outside itself; it is, instead, a combination of its own visual and verbal certainties. (pp. 252-54)

Enough, however, situates reduction in a far more elaborate verbal environment. In this work Beckett makes us trace the shape of an emotion, not the shape of any steady object. The problem for the reader is to understand the terms of a human relationship, not in its existence…. Beckett evokes a note of real tragedy, something elegiac, an emotion of deep melancholy. Shaping into words a sense of loss, textuality here is "bereft, rid if you prefer, of occasion in every shape and from, ideal as well as material."

Enough is Beckett's A la recherche du temps perdu in miniature. Proust's multivolume canvas is, in effect, reinvented to conform to the reduced scale it occupies within the limits of Beckett's small planet. As Marcel remembers images before recalling the density and specificity of significant detail, Enough gives us "all that goes before forget." Referential images are alternately arithmetic or romantic, evoking the old antinomy between reason and imagination. Tempting us to do some "literary book-keeping" outside Beckett's text, this piece recalls Keatsian "flowers at my feet" from "Ode to a Nightingale," Shelley's lyre from "Ode to the West Wind," and Yeats's mythic bird from "Leda and the Swan." The couple in Enough has ambitions as sidereal as those of any romantic. In this "endless equinox" the younger member of the pair has "Aquarius hands," and the two are die-hard stargazers…. As steadfast as Keats's "bright star," Beckett's seedy pathfinders choose to gaze at constellations sharing a fate as mysteriously linked as their own. Lyra and Cygnus float in space next to one another and appear in April as a dual "mansion above."

A work which on first reading may seem to refer to nothing outside of itself, Enough slowly begins to operate on more than one level of meaning and in more than one dimension of form. Such an assumption leads us to unexpected discoveries, warning us not to look at this work superficially, for it contains more than first meets the eye. In making consistent use of inherited stellar imagery, Beckett constructs the language of Enough from the ruins of the romantic past. But made of remembrances rather than events, this astrological swan's way is also a variation on a theme by Proust. Unlike Imagination Dead Imagine, Enough is, then, a monster of allusion. (pp. 254-55)

The significance of the number three, though it brings unity to the composition of Enough and makes us search for the kind of symbolic texture we have already said we were not going to look for, seems to be as arbitrary as it is consistent. It is, however, a formal contrivance asking us to draw a metaphysical implication from a trinity whose only certainty is stylistic virtuosity. It points nowhere but back to itself. For in Enough the numbers that recur, the allusive content, and the emotional effect by no means coincide or even mutually support each other. (p. 257)

In its reliance on familiar romantic images and in its curious transformation of elementary number concepts, Enough, unlike Imagination Dead Imagine, is by no means the tight little island unto itself that it initially appears to be. This short piece is rife with the broken fragments of recognizable Beckett iconography. Its first paragraph notes the "art and craft" of a writing implement as heroic as the inspired collaborator previously memorialized in Malone Dies; the title resurrects Grehan's "ample" Spenserian ending in the poem "To Nelly" which Mr. Hackett recites to the Nixons in Watt: "Enough—." Even the "flowers" fall into line within Beckett's "stiff interexclusiveness." As stemless as Monet's "water lilies" (though they can be eaten, "no brightening our buttonhole with these"), they are mysteriously sunken into earth as is Winnie herself. We have seen such self-reference before in Beckett's work. But fragments come in different shapes and sizes; those in Enough carry just enough weight to keep the technique from disappearing completely.

Sex in Enough is similarly self-referential. For though Beckett's narrator realizes Molly Bloom's fantasy ("When he told me to lick his penis I hastened to do so") femininity is nowhere suggested until the conclusion, when "breasts" startles us as the only mention of gender identification—an ambiguous one at that…. Like Molloy and Malone, like Hamm and Clov, like the murmurers in the mud in How It Is the "he" in Enough is on his "last legs." One is literally overwhelmed by such an amazing variety of "funambulistic" staggers. But no Sucky Moll postscripts "oyster kisses" here. In their place Beckett offers words, each leading in a different direction, for condensation and reduction means that there is more than one source of images clamoring for the attention of the conscious mind. "Ejaculations" are, then, simultaneously phallic and verbal, each alternative competing for the reader's attention. Surface and depth, foreground and background, are perpetually set in verbal motion.

Though Enough displays a speaker who is as much an Astrophel as his kinsman Murphy or the narrator searching for the Wains at the end of "First Love," in terms of tone and imagery this piece most closely parallels the spirit of Mercier and Camier. "Fraught with more events than could fit in a fat tome," the novel could be read as the genuine article for which Enough might be a possible abstract. That strange, possibly homosexual pair, whose rites of passage we study in miniature in Enough, are the literary descendants of the novel's two heroes…. Each story, though one is realistic and the other abstract in comparison, outlines the break-up of what seems to have been a beautiful but impossible relationship. In place of how-it-is, we learn the-way-it-was. In Mercier and Camier the narrator is "with them all the time" and records the density of incident and experience. Enough traces only that very little bit "that goes before forget." Reduction cancels everything but the flowers. (pp. 259-61)

Mercier and Camier are on a journey to nowhere in particular. "What does it matter," cries Mercier, "where we are going? We are going, that's enough." They set off to leave town only to discuss whether or not they should return. It is the journey and not the arrival that matters, for this is another Beckett work-in-process, not progress. No incident of plot is elaborated and no psychological motivation is probed. The journey in fact consists only of words.

But Mercier and Camier are hardly the same abstracted ejaculators we encounter in Enough…. Enough gives us a … sense of loss, but without the realistic events to frame the sentiment. The result is an emotion not so much absent as abstracted, reduced to the eloquent dimensions of a fragment. In Mercier and Camier there are abrupt transitions from chapter to chapter and from paragraph to paragraph; in Enough they are from sentence to sentence and from word to word. Whereas Mercier and Camier provides us with summaries at the end of every two chapters, resembling the Addenda to Watt, Enough offers us no such tidy aids to reflection. There is only just "enough" plot to keep the emotion going. And though the thread of plot is distinct, the impression of the whole is one of mistiness and melancholy. What remains is pure atmosphere. We are no longer in the realm of fiction, but in that of mood and mystery.

In Beckett's late style a little language is a dangerous thing. Words, appearing in new compositions and relationships, are in a constant state of becoming, condensing in their wake not only traditional concepts of time, but also of space on the page. In Enough memory is Beckett's principal subject and he makes it the measure of time by embracing several decades in a succession of briefly recorded moments. In this work … there is, in fact, no real time. Images evoke events which make their own conjunctions. Only images remain in "all that goes before forget," for the nature of rational thought is illusory. Despite its rich allusive flavor, Enough therefore defies the reader to construe the piece as an imitation of anything but a raw emotion recollected in its own miniaturized tranquility.

Within the dimensions of its own small boundaries, Enough is, therefore "a whole." Beckett sets "enough" in a variety of verbal situations…. Within the work "enough" achieves special power when it is frequently contrasted with the opposing qualities of excessiveness and deficiency…. Against the measurements of enough (enough what?), too little, and too much, Beckett has his narrator tease us with the hint of some unspecified something that is more than enough…. Recycling Didi's calm from Godot ("The English say cawm"), this narrator never tells us calmly or otherwise what he knows and what he does not know. "After such knowledge," we wonder along with Eliot, "what forgiveness?" "What do I know of a man's destiny?" speculates the Beckett hero; "I could tell you more about radishes." Out of this dilemma, however, Beckett weaves his ironic whole, punning all the way: "One day … he explained to me that anatomy is a whole," "They had on the whole a calming action," "We were on the whole calm." Offering us an encounter with integration out of fragmentation, the restricted verbal landscape of Enough therefore retains its individual concrete identity. (pp. 263-64)