THIS novel is probably the most impenetrable of all of Beckett's prose works. It was first published in a trade edition of 4,000 copies in Britain in 1964, and this reprint is only the third in the 34 year period since first publication. While poor distribution may have contributed to its neglect by the reading public, it is probably fairer to say that the text itself is daunting, demanding a level of attention, retention and concentration that few readers are inclined to invest. That fact alone should persuade us that here Beckett is at his most cunning, most demanding and rewarding.
The original text, Comment c'est, was written 1958-60 and published in Paris in 1961 - Beckett translated it intermittently during 1962-3 while he was working on the play Happy Days. Keen readers will find many echoes of the play in the novel and vice versa. The play is, effectively, a female monologue in two Acts but the novel is constituted by a male narration in three parts. The setting is minimalist: the narrator crawls through mud, clutching a jute sack containing tins of fish products and an opener with a piriform handle. The place he crawls in appears to be without bourne, a place of "primeval mud" and "impenetrable darkness", a place he refers to as Erebus. In a letter to Jake Schwartz in 1959, Beckett said that the setting of his "work in progress" (the parallel phrase, "ruins in prospect", occurs in the text) was related to the fifth circle of Hell.
A few formulations of what is enacted in this setting are possible: the journey (Part 1), the couple (encounter with Pim - Part 2), the abandon (life after Pim - Part 3). Other formulations give a record of "the heart's outpourings day by day" or a quest, "to seek out the true home". The reader should not opt for one formulation exclusively as that would disambiguate the text, impoverish the resonances which it organises into dense clusters.
In Part I the narrator is visited by a number of, recollections, memories (the text presents them as "images") of life "above in the light". These images have features suggesting that their origins are directly autobiographical. Throughout the text generally, fragments or remnants of a rich cultural history are scattered like so many truffles in the muck. Amongst these are the Bible (a key allusion is made to Psalm 103), gobbets of Dante, of the sciences, ,mathematics, the humanities. And the dead master, Joyce, is present on the lexical and methodological levels.
Finnegans Wake offers its readers a conspectus of universal history as a "funferal", a wake with "lots of fun" where the water of life splashed on the corpse leads to resurrection, renewal, the same anew. For Joyce, there is nothing new under the sun and the passing show is intrinsically comic. Beckett is of the contrary, tragic persuasion. History is a nightmare from which there is no awakening: for Beckett the Enlightenment project hit the buffers in the railyard at Auschwitz, was vaporised in the false dawn over Hiroshima, was buried under the rubble of St Lo in Normandy where he worked with the ,Irish Red Cross at the end of the war. That is the "mess" he sought to accommodate in his art, and ,How It Is offers one form of that accommodation.
The central Part 2, the encounter with Pim, is presented in terms of unmitigated viciousness, where human communication is reduced to bloody inscription of words on bare flesh, peremptory stabbings with the opener, thumps of the fist on the skull. What prevents the reader from being whelmed by these visions of misery is the mode of narration through which they are delivered to us. The text is unpunctuated throughout, broken into short bursts of utterance. The local difficulties and occasional, joys of decipherment are mercifully interposed between the reader and a sense of helpless outrage and consternation. The outrage is not assuaged or deflected but deferred, gathering heavy and volatile within us, until it finds its proper catharsis in the recognition that that is how it is.
This reprint (published in partnership with Edgar Aronson) is a photo reproduction of the 1964 British first edition, an edition for which considerable pains had been expended on the typesetting. Despite the few (very few) transmissional errors in the text, this edition is vastly superior to either the original, French of 1961 (reset in 1975 for some odd reason) or the deplorable Grove Press American edition of 1964. Beckett readers are advised to get it now, while it is available.