Waiting for Godot was famously summed up as a play where “nothing happens. Twice.” The same might be said for Samuel Beckett’s first published novel, Murphy, with a slight caveat – rather than nothing happening, Beckett’s hero wants nothing to happen. Or better yet, to be nothing.
Sounds grim, right? Yet just like Dostoevsky can make scenes that would seem insane if written by another author, Beckett manages to find humor in even the most nihilistic of places, and that’s in no small part due to his love of language, evident on every page of this strange and captivating novel.
Consider the very first sentence – “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.” On a literal level it might sound bleak, but think how unique this description is – the sun indeed has “no alternative,” but only Beckett would think to note that, or to describe the totality of the world as “the nothing new.” There’s a sense of humor there, albeit an acerbic, world-weary one, that perfectly captures how the story doesn’t quite take the world, or itself, too seriously.
Before going any further into Murphy, however, it’s useful to put this novel in the context of Beckett’s career. You may not be aware that Beckett was something of an intern of James Joyce, doing research, in fact, to help Joyce with Finnegans Wake. And after that novel met with polarized opinions (to put it mildly), Beckett was one of a handful of others who wrote essays defending the novel, which was published in a collection entitled Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (a title calculated to annoy those who were already annoyed by what critics saw as the linguistic nonsense of Finnegans Wake).
I mention this because Beckett, understandably, was heavily influenced by Joyce. Writers are influenced by Joyce to this day, so how much more prevalent must that influence have been on someone like Beckett, who actually worked with the man. Yet this wasn’t entirely beneficial. Beckett’s early work at times reminds one of, say, Franz Kafka’s Amerika, a novel influenced by Dickens and not yet expressing a confident, independent voice. That’s what Beckett needed, a way to find his own voice out from under Joyce’s shadow.
And he found it when, to paraphrase, Beckett eventually realized that, rather than try to outdo Joyce in maximalism, he should instead embrace the most stripped-down minimalism conceivable. I believe he said he was interested in “subtraction, not addition,” or something to that effect. The rest of his work would testify to this fundamental shift, as his plays, poems, novels, and even films moved asymptotically ever closer to absolute zero.
Murphy is an interesting read because it predates this artistic epiphany and thus still has a whiff of Joyce to it. For instance, the love of language I mentioned at the outset evinces itself in at least three ways. First, practically every includes a word that requires you to do a google search (and, as far as I can tell, they’re all pre-existing words – i.e., unlike many of Joyce’s they aren’t his own inventions). Second, Beckett includes bits of other languages, mainly Latin and French, in the text (it’s worth remembering Beckett helped Joyce research dozens of languages to include in Finnegans Wake). And third, there’s a palpable playful quality to his sentences, which use all the rhetorical tricks you can think of, that’s hard to convey but is obvious when you read it, especially if you read it aloud.
At this point you might be wondering – fine, fine, but what is Murphy about? Well, the short answer is that a man named Murphy does his best to avoid getting a job but eventually gets one in a mental institution while a bizarre cast of characters, including friends and fiancées, try to track him down for various, and ever-changing, reasons.
The Murphy-plot was my favorite because he was so unpredictable and, in a way, cartoonish. The way he dressed alone in a green suit (which Beckett points out is technically aeruginous – see what I mean about needing to Google words?) reminded me of Wes Anderson movies, whose characters are so much larger-than-life the plots seem secondary, if they can be detached from the characters at all. I’m also reminded of Quentin Tarantino characters, who are so distinct and memorable that there’re about a dozen or more that would make instantly recognizable Halloween costumes (Jules from Pulp Fiction, anyone from the two Kill Bill films, etc.). Furthermore, Murphy isn’t some mindless piece of flotsam drifting here and there. He has a surprisingly well-thought out Cartesian dualist idea of how his mind and body work – a conception that Beckett dedicates an entire chapter to laying out. Plus, the ending has a great deal to do with without-a-doubt the most absurd game of chess ever played, and any novel that involves chess automatically has me hooked.
The parallel story about Murphy’s friends and lovers is fun in its own right, like a comedy about a ragtag group whose obsession with Murphy is never explained – a wise move by Beckett as it enhances the book’s absurd quality.
Overall, then, Murphy is a fun story with strange, beguiling character and will be of interest to anyone who is intrigued by so-called “experimental” writing but isn’t ready to dive into the denser stuff out there. In fact, the main reason I read Murphy is because I intend to go through all of Beckett’s novels, partly because of a renewed interest in him, but also because, as they get progressively experimental, I’m hopeful that by the end a plethora of entirely new authors and works will be accessible at last.
Though I’m sure it’ll be a long, long time before I’m ready for Finnegans Wake.
So go read it. Now.
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