The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Samuel Beckett · a novel · written in French as Malone meurt and published by Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1951; made into English by Beckett himself as Malone Dies, Grove Press, New York, 1956 · scored on the French original as the second novel of the trilogy, on its own, read from knowledge; Beckett’s own English quoted, beneath the French where both are given; no text in hand
Mode
Comic novel of dying; a deathbed journal and a story told against time, in one continuous text
Mythos
The maker dying with the made; death as a birth, the bed as a womb; the ferry of the dead
Phase
The last days of a man’s life, from the plan he sets himself to the breaking of his last sentence
Presentation
Fiction; one continuous first-person text without chapters or numbered parts, divided only by paragraphs, written in an exercise book in pencil; two strands alternating, the writer’s present state and his stories
Register
From the drab realism of the Saposcat and Lambert pages and the obsessive inventory of the room to the black farce of the asylum and a close where the syntax gives out
Scale
One room, one bed, a pencil; two families, an asylum, a boat at night
Governing Proposition
An old man in a room, kept in bed and tended by a hand that brings soup and takes the slops, writes in an exercise book with a pencil while he waits to die. He means to pass the time by telling himself stories and then making an inventory of what he owns; the one story he tells at length, of a boy called Sapo who becomes an old man called Macmann, kept in an asylum, keeps sliding back into the condition of the man who tells it. The wager of the novel is that a consciousness at its end can neither stop telling nor believe what it tells, that its stories are at once its consolation, its alibi and the form of its dying, and that only a text which lasts exactly as long as its writer can show it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Je serai quand même bientôt tout à fait mort enfin”
“I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of it all”. The novel opens on a death awaited like an appointment long put off. “Quand même” sets defiance against it and “enfin” relief, and the sentence holds the two at once, with a comic stiffness in its last word. Beckett wrote the book in French, and Éditions de Minuit published it in Paris in 1951 as Malone meurt. The English given on this page is his own, Malone Dies, published by Grove Press in New York in 1956: a rewriting by the author, not a translation by another hand.
Malone is old and in bed, in a room he cannot leave. A hand brings soup and takes away the slops. He has a stick, which is his only reach into the world beyond the bed, and a pencil and an exercise book, and what we read is what he writes in it. The text is continuous, without chapters or numbered parts, divided only by paragraphs. It lasts as long as the pencil lasts, and as long as he does.
He sets himself a plan. He will pass the time that is left by telling himself stories, and then by making an inventory of what he owns, and when the plan is done he will be done. The plan is the whole of the book, and every part of it answers to the plan: the passages of his present state, because the dying is the plot; the stories, because they are how the dying is borne; and their failures, because the failure of the stories is what the book has to show. From the first pages the plan begins to go wrong, and the going wrong is the story.
Movement II
The story Malone tells at length is of a boy called Sapo, son of the Saposcats, a petty bourgeois family with hopes for their son. Sapo is meant to be other than his maker: young, mobile, in the world. Malone sets him in drab, exact detail, as if realism were a discipline he could hold himself to, and keeps breaking off to judge what he has written. The stories are his way of not being alone with himself in the room, and every time he returns to the room the story has to be begun again.
Sapo goes out to the Lamberts, a peasant household on a farm. Big Lambert kills pigs for a trade; there are lentils, and the seasons, and the work of the farm, all in the same flat light. The distance between the two families is held with the same eye that sees each of them. Then Malone gives his verdict on his own story: “What tedium”. The tedium is meant. It is the texture of a man filling the time before death, and a reader bored by Sapo is in Malone’s position.
The joke is made early, though, and the farm pages run on past the point where it adds a turn. That is the cost of the method, and the book pays it in the open. Meanwhile the story keeps failing in the way Malone fears most: the creature built to be other than himself grows silent and begins to slide toward the room. When the story breaks off and the present returns, it is not clear how far apart they ever were.
Movement III
Between the stories the room returns, and Malone takes its inventory with an obsessive precision: the bed, his few possessions, his body, the light in the room and the sky beyond the window. The precision is the other register of the book, as exact as the farm pages are drab, and it is just as much a way of passing the time. Each time the story fails, the room comes back; each time the room becomes unbearable, the story resumes. The alternation is the argument, made into the shape of the text.
Malone loses his stick. It was the one thing by which he could reach past the bed into the world, and with it gone the world recedes to what he can touch and see. The body is failing, and he breaks off to report on it, and on his pencil. A visitor comes into the room, and the book does not say who or what the visitor is; it stands at the edge of the book’s order, unplaced.
Out of this a creed is spoken, cold and level: “Nothing is more real than nothing”. Democritus becomes a dying man’s profession of faith. The sentence is a height, and it is also a joke, and the book does not choose between them. Malone sees his own dying as a birth, the bed as a womb and the death as a delivery, and the image governs everything that follows: the man who has made a creature to keep him company is himself about to be born into nothing.
Movement IV
When the story resumes after a gap Malone cannot account for, its hero has a new name. Sapo is now Macmann, and Macmann is old. The renaming is the passage of time and a failing mind made into form: something has happened in the maker’s life that the maker cannot recover, and the creature carries the mark of it. Macmann sits on a bench, and the stretch runs long. Then he is taken into an asylum, the House of Saint John of God.
There he has a keeper, Moll, and the two have a grotesque, tender love. Moll has her crucifixes. The body is everywhere in these pages: age, appetite, excretion, desire, all set down with the same flat comedy. The name Macmann, son of man, and Moll’s crucifixes summon the sacred, and the summons is partly a joke; the book lets the emblems stand and laughs at them in the same sentence.
Moll gives way to another keeper, Lemuel, and the asylum’s care shades into cruelty. By now the creature built to be other than his maker is old, bedridden, kept, and dependent on a stranger’s hand: he is Malone. Whether Lemuel is Malone too is one of the questions the book leaves open. The institution and its charity are given a face in Lady Pedal, who arranges an outing for the inmates to an island.
Movement V
The outing goes out across the water at night. Lemuel has a hatchet. The boat drifts out with its load of the confined, under a keeper with a weapon, into the dark: the ferry of the dead, built into the plot rather than alluded to. It is the book’s last height, terror and grotesque comedy together, and it is reached at the moment the man who tells it is giving out.
For as the boat drifts, the sentence breaks. The prose comes apart into short lines, and the lines thin. Maker and creature end in one movement: the story stops when the teller stops, and the teller stops when the pencil and the life give out together. A dying consciousness cannot narrate its own death; the form shows the narration stopping instead, line by line, until the last words in Beckett’s English: “never anything / there / any more”.
Whether Malone dies at the close, or kills, or only stops writing, the book does not say, and the question has been argued since. What it has shown is a man who could neither stop telling nor believe what he told, whose stories were at once his comfort, his excuse and the shape of his dying, and who made a creature to be other than himself and watched it become him. The exercise book ends where the life ends. The appointment of the first sentence is kept.
Act III · The Twelve
The plan is announced, and it is the whole of the book: Malone will pass the time before death by telling himself stories and then making an inventory, and when the plan is done he will be done. Every part answers to it. The present-state passages are needed because the dying is the plot; the stories, because they are how the dying is borne; their failures, because the failure of the stories is what the book discloses. The close is compelled. What holds the axis here is the Lambert stretch: its tedium is meant, and Malone says so, “What tedium”, but the joke of a narrator bored by his own fiction is made early, and the farm pages run past the point where it adds a turn, as do parts of Macmann on the bench. Perhaps a tenth of the book is permitted rather than compelled.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a consciousness at its end can neither stop telling nor believe what it tells, and the stories by which it passes the time are at once its consolation, its alibi and the form of its dying. Malone builds Sapo to be other than himself, and the creature slides back into his maker’s condition, old, bedridden, kept, dependent on a stranger’s hand; then maker and creature end in one sentence. A second disclosure is plainer, of dependence: the old and the confined at the mercy of their keepers, the institution’s care shading into cruelty in Lemuel. A meaning, not a mood. Held below the top because much of it lives in tone, the comic despair and the shrug, and because the condition disclosed is a single consciousness’s more than a human order’s.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Elevation in Beckett’s register, dread and laughter in the same sentence, with a few real heights of terror and beauty. The opening sets it: death awaited as a long-postponed appointment, with a comic stiffness in its closing “enfin”. Malone’s account of the light in his room and the sky beyond his window, the loss of the stick that is his only reach into the world, the grotesque tenderness of Macmann and Moll, and above all the close: a keeper with a hatchet, a boat drifting out at night with its load of the confined, and the sentence dissolving line by line as Malone’s life gives out. “Nothing is more real than nothing” is spoken as a cold height. Held here because the Lambert pages are flat by design, and the heights come at a moderate rate in a short book.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Myth built, in three structures that bear load. The first is the maker dying with his creature: Malone is a small demiurge with a pencil, making a man so as not to be alone with himself, and his world ends as his life does; the old pattern of the maker and the made is set on a deathbed. The second is death as birth: the dying is a delivery and the bed a womb, and the image governs the book rather than ornamenting it. The third is the last passage, the asylum’s inmates taken out across the water at night under a keeper with a hatchet: the ferry of the dead built into the plot. Held below the top because other figures are evoked more than built, Macmann’s name, son of man, and Moll’s crucifixes among them, and are partly a joke at myth’s expense.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inheritance is the novel as Joyce and Proust left it, the first-person confession, the self-conscious narrators of Sterne and Diderot, Descartes and Geulincx behind the immobile thinker, Dante’s Belacqua, and Beckett’s own English novels, Murphy and Watt. The turn, which this book makes more visible than its neighbours, is to put the making of fiction inside the fiction as a dying man’s last act: stories begun, judged, abandoned, renamed in mid-course, the narrator breaking off to report on his pencil. The stake was real: Beckett had left English for French and was writing with no publisher and little prospect, and the trilogy was refused before Minuit took it. Held below the top because the decisive break, the voice without a world, was made in Molloy and pressed further in L’Innommable; the narrator-as-author has older precedents.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The book is the exercise book: what we read is what Malone writes, and the text lasts as long as his pencil and his life, so its end is his death, not a report of it. The alternation of present state and story is the argument made structural: each time the story fails, the room returns, and each time the room becomes unbearable, the story resumes. The renaming of Sapo as Macmann, after a gap Malone cannot account for, makes the passage of time and a failing mind into form. The close, the prose breaking into short lines that thin to nothing, is the only way the book could end: a dying consciousness cannot narrate its death, and the form shows the narration stopping. Held off the very top because the Lambert pages could be shaped otherwise without loss.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, and seventy-five years supply it, mostly in the criticism of the trilogy: Hugh Kenner’s Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study (1961), Ruby Cohn’s books on the comic and the canon, H. Porter Abbott on the form of Beckett’s fiction, Maurice Blanchot’s essay on the trilogy’s voice (1953), James Knowlson’s biography (1996). The questions the book plants are still argued: whether Malone is the author of the trilogy’s other narrators, as his list of those who came before him seems to claim; whether he dies at the close, or kills, or only stops writing; what the visitor is; whether the stories are escape or confession; whether Lemuel is Malone. Each return finds the comedy darker and the structure more exact. Held below the top because the book is studied chiefly as the middle term of the trilogy, with less criticism of its own than either neighbour.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The field is the French novel of the mid twentieth century and, through Beckett’s English, the novel in English after modernism. The intrinsic force is high: with its two neighbours the book reorganised what a novel could be, a voice in a room with the world receding, plot reduced to the effort to make one, the narrator’s authority dissolved into his inventions. Held at the bar and a little above it because the reach belongs chiefly to the trilogy and to Godot, and Molloy and L’Innommable are cited as the decisive books more often than this one; its share of the redirection is real, but a share. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the new novel claimed Beckett as forerunner; the line runs through Bernhard, Coetzee and later European prose of the single voice; Beckett received the Nobel Prize in 1969; and the trilogy is read and taught across languages.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over seventy-five years, with no credit for time not yet elapsed. Form and fabric take no charge: the text survives whole, as Beckett published it in French and as he made it in English, and it has been in print in both languages throughout. Its surface is not fixed to its moment: a room, a bed, a pencil, an asylum and a boat carry no date, and nothing in it needs 1951 to be understood. The charge falls on presence. The book is read chiefly as the middle volume of the trilogy, bound with its neighbours in one English volume since 1959, and its readers are more in the academy and among writers than across the culture; it has nothing like the presence of Godot. Seventy-five years shown are not the centuries behind the oldest works, and the bar is cleared with half a point to spare.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged on Beckett’s French, with his own English beside it. The command is of the plain sentence put to extreme work: short words, exact syntax, comic timing, and a sentence that qualifies and retracts itself as it goes, so that every statement carries its own doubt. The opening shows the instrument in small, “quand même” and “enfin” bracketing the death between defiance and relief. The registers are held apart and in one hand: the drab realism of the Saposcat and Lambert pages, the precise, obsessive inventory of the room, the black farce of the asylum, and the close, where syntax gives out on schedule. The tedium is controlled, which is harder than avoiding it. Held below the highest marks because the Lambert stretch tests the reader beyond what its effect needs, and some of the self-interrupting asides repeat their mechanism.
Score: 9.2 / 10
One law governs: everything in the book is a way of passing the time until death, and nothing can be told that does not end in the teller’s condition. Take the two most distant elements: the Lamberts’ farm, with its pig-killing, its lentils and its seasons in drab realist detail, and the boat at night under a keeper’s hatchet. They obey the same law. Each is a story told to keep from the room, and each slides toward the room’s state, the farm into Sapo’s silence and the asylum into Malone’s own confinement. Malone’s contradictions, lapses and revisions are the law at work, since a failing mind is its premise. The range runs from rural realism to metaphysical farce. Held below the top because the range is still narrow by design, and narrowness is not coherence; and the visitor stands at the edge of the book’s physics without being placed.
Score: 8.9 / 10
More orders than its size suggests, all bound through the dying man. Consciousness first: memory, invention, the failing mind. The body: age, immobility, appetite, excretion, and sexuality in the grotesque love of Macmann and Moll. The family: the Saposcats, petty bourgeois with hopes for their son, and the Lamberts, a peasant household. Labour: the farm’s work and Big Lambert’s trade of killing pigs. Class: the distance between the two families, each seen with the same flat eye. The institution: the asylum, its keepers, and its charity in Lady Pedal. The sacred: Moll’s crucifixes, and the death as birth that frames everything. What holds the axis here is what is not held: history and the state are absent, the world beyond the room and the asylum is sketched, and the short form gives each order in outline. The figure describes the form.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.2, then The Living Form and The Imperishable at 9.0, and The Inner Law at 8.9. A plain sentence put to extreme work, qualifying and retracting itself as it goes, with the drab, the obsessive, the farcical and the failing held apart in one hand; a form that is the exercise book itself, lasting as long as its writer and ending with him; a text whole in both of its author’s languages for seventy-five years; and one law, that every story ends in the teller’s condition, governing a farm and a boat of the dead alike.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.9, held by what is not held: history and the state are absent, the world beyond the room and the asylum is sketched, and the short form gives each of its orders, the body, the family, labour, class, the institution and the sacred, in outline. Next above it, The Inevitable at 8.4, where the Lambert pages and parts of Macmann on the bench run past the point where their tedium adds a turn.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.2, The Living Form at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.0, The Unconcealment at 8.7, The Archetypal Deep at 8.7, The Swerve at 8.7 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, the last by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below 8.4, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.9. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, at 8.7.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Samuel Beckett’s Malone meurt, a novel written in French and published by Éditions de Minuit, Paris, in 1951. It is scored on the French original, as the second novel of the trilogy and on its own; Molloy and L’Innommable are its context, and what the trilogy does as a sequence is credited here only where this book carries it. The English is Malone Dies (Grove Press, New York, 1956), Beckett’s own. It serves two purposes: it is the English quoted on this page, beneath the French where both are given, and it is the version this reading knows across the whole length of the book. It was chosen because it is the author’s rewriting rather than a translation by another hand, so that no translator’s shortfall stands between the reader and the work. Every axis is judged on the French, and nothing in the English is charged to the work. The French is known here less closely than the English, and few of its sentences with certainty; where the two may differ in ways this reading cannot judge, nothing is credited or charged. No text was in hand, nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Words are quoted only where they are certain: the opening sentence in French and English, and in Beckett’s English “What tedium”, “Nothing is more real than nothing” and the last words. Everything else is paraphrased, including the wording of Malone’s plan. Facts that could not be verified, among them the dates of composition, the length of the book, the first publisher of the one-volume English trilogy, the words in which Malone names his dying a birth, and what Moll’s emblems were meant to figure, are not given.