Where new writing finds its voice
Review

Company

Nick Fry

By Samuel Beckett
Calder Publications 1996

Tracing the thoughts and memories of an unidentified person lying on his back in the dark, Beckett takes us on a bleak and often comic exploration of the existential anatomy of a thinking being, bound in darkness to a potentially futile mode of self-examination. Characteristically economic in his use of language, Beckett forms his unique prose, which variously gives the impression of a philosophical treatise, stage directions in a play, and prose poetry.

The opening sentence reads: ‘A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine.’ Initially, the recipient of the voice is conceived of as somebody in the third person, some other to whom the text alludes. But it is soon evident that the narrative voice can just as easily announce: ‘You first saw the light in the room you most likely were conceived in.’ The use of the second person means the voice addresses simultaneously the ‘one in the dark’ and the reader, merging them as one and the same beneficiary of the same unbidden voice.

This voice – which is also always that of the text and reader – becomes an elusive and evasive phenomenon; at first the voice of the author, then an unidentified voice in the dark, then the voice of the one on his back – addressing himself: ‘You are on your back in the dark’, or murmuring out loud: ‘Yes I remember.’ The one voice gives rise to a cast of speakers which seem to form spontaneously from the basic elements of grammar and reason.

In this way, the self in Company is trapped in dialogue with himself – a person with only language and his imagination to make sense of his desolate predicament. At times the darkness is denied by his impassive, finicky reasoning. But invariably his vain attempts to verify propositions quickly become an inane struggle with the unforgiving terrain of words and grammar. At times it is as if the pronouns, ‘I’, ‘You’ and ‘He’ compete for jurisdiction over him. The ‘I’ remains the most remote, usually a mere suspicion that enigmatically warrants the imperative ‘Quick leave him’, while ‘You’ gains dominance, a narrative voice capable of giving some shape and direction to the intangible darkness. In fact, it is by way of the second person that we, the reader, journey on behalf of the one in the dark through a variety of vivid memories – birth, an unexpected rebuke, a loving embrace, walking in the winter snow. These recollections appear in the text as a blooming from the unrelenting void of the dark.

In spite of these occasional and profoundly moving spells in the vivid world of memories, the subject and reader is inevitably returned to his debased state in the dark. Here he is compelled to contemplate possible states of affairs as alternatives to his present predicament. At one point the voice expresses its comic and profane contempt for his very being by suggesting that his existence there alone on his back could be improved by a fly landing on him, mistaking him for dead – ‘What an addition to company that would be!’ the voice exclaims.

Here in this awful dark – where ‘by far the greater part of what is said cannot be verified’ – it becomes clear that almost any form of event or stimulation provoking thought, and necessarily a form of dialogue, is a welcome addition to the company of oneself, and infinitely preferable to nothing. But equally, such banal, mechanical distractions strike a cruel contrast with the vivid transporting effect of memory.

The visions of things past become Time’s unsympathetic theft; the pitch black, by contrast a purgatory; and the fruitless calculations of a rational mind, the insuperable trappings of language.