References are to my punctuated and paragraphed version, and to the Everyman Trilogy (1997).
1. ‘It, say it, not knowing what.’ See p.110: ‘And now for the it’.
Aporia: the speaker professes to be at a loss what to say (rhetoric).
Ephectic: habitually suspending judgement. (But clearly you can be aware of doing that.)
2. ‘Malone is there.’ Malone meurt was finished in about August 1948. L'Innommable was begun on 29 March 1949 (En Attendant Godot came in between). Beckett dated it 1949, but typed it out in summer 1950, in Ireland. His mother died on 25 August 1950.
3. ‘brimless hat’. Malone, in Malone Dies, had a hat (‘I shall put on my hat’ page 286), but it is not described.
‘on his feet or on his knees’. See Worstward Ho, p.15: ‘Kneeling. Better kneeling.’
‘the first thing’. See p. 2: ‘And things?’ Also p.126: ‘If only there were a thing!’
‘other pits, deeper down’. See Malone Dies p. 248: ‘Perhaps there are other vaults even deeper than mine, why not?’
Narthex: vestibule (lobby between the outer door and the interior) at the west end of a church.
4. ‘his beard would fill me with pity’. No mention of Malone’s beard in Malone Dies?
‘gazing before me like a great barn-owl in an aviary’. See p.123: ‘eyes…..like the owl cooped in the grotto in Battersea Park’
‘forbears’. Misprint for ‘forebears’. Or could it mean ‘forbearing forebears’?
5. ‘I am relying on these lights’. see p.15: ‘the lights, on which I had set such store’.
‘all the fun of the fair’. See p.2: ‘bustle of a bargain sale’.
6. ‘Molloy’. Yes - Molloy!
Enceinte: enclosure wall. See p.12: ‘the enclosure wall’.
‘Hell itself...dates from the revolt of Lucifer’. Dante? Milton?
7. ‘feeble cry’. See p.68: ‘the little cry….. like a wounded wistit’.
‘pseudo-couple Mercier-Camier’. Why ‘pseudo’? Mercier et Camier was written in summer 1946.
8. ‘my seat would appear to be somewhat elevated’. See p.81: ‘That didn’t take long: soon we’ll have him perched on an eminence.’
9. 'poison and antidote’: sin and redemption.
‘Basil’. Significance of this name?
‘filled me with hatred’. There is little hatred after Basil is renamed Mahood (p. 22).
10. ‘The other’: is he ‘the companion to Malone’ (page 7)?
‘he brings me presents’. See p.11: ‘offerings for me’.
12. ‘enclosure wall’. See p. 6: ‘the enceinte’.
‘as red as live coals’. See p. 9: Basil’s ‘eyes like cinders’.
‘wonder if the two retinae are not facing each other’: wonder if the two eyes are not looking at each other. The other eye would be ‘[blood-]shot with rose’.
‘I am Matthew and I am the angel’: the scribe Matthew and the messenger Gabriel.
13. ‘exordia’. Exordium: introduction to a formal literary work.
14. ‘the inside of my distant skull’. Precursor of later heroes in skulls. Are there skulls, in this sense, in Molloy or Malone Dies?
‘old satiated rat’. Why satiated?
‘tester-bed’. How is a tester-bed distinct from a cradle?
‘as in the Caucasus’: like Prometheus.
15 ‘Prometheus was delivered twenty-nine thousand nine hundred and seventy years after having purged his offence’. Whence the 30,000 years less 30 years?
16. ‘I. Of whom I know nothing.’ Thus begins the last paragraph.
17. ‘Malone's hat’. Again!
Mucilage: a gelatinous substance obtained esp from seaweeds and similar to plant gums.
Puttees: spirally wound leggings in an Indian army uniform.
‘organs’ are bodily, not musical: ‘organes’, not ‘orgues’.
18. ‘let me change my tune’. See p 52: ‘I have my faults, but changing my tune is not one of them.’
19. ‘this voice that is not mine’. Is this voice in Molloy or Malone Dies?
20. Facetiae: humorous witticisms; pornographic items in booksellers’ catalogues.
21. ‘this venerable organ’: this mouth.
22. ‘I'll call him Mahood’: Ma+hood. Manhood.
23. Pensum: imposition (in French schools).
24. ‘a whole college of tyrants’. See p.9: ‘four or five of them’.
‘bereft of hands’. But see p.4: ‘my hands on my knees’.
The Carmagnole: a dance (and song) of the French Revolution, performed, inter alia, around the guillotine.
Dansons la carmagnole
Vive le son, vive le son,
Dansons la carmagnole
Vive le son du canon.
26. Satrap: a provincial governor in the Achaemenian empire. The division into satrapies was completed by Darius 1 (522-486 BC).
"They clothed me and gave me money." The first sentence of The End (1946).
‘Moran's boss (I forget his name).’ Youdi, in Molloy.
‘Cases one and two.’ Case two is never considered, in fact.
‘I nearly said con-‘ : I nearly said ‘constriction’ not ‘restriction’.
27. ‘everything there being set and settled’. See How It Is: ‘our justice’.
28. ‘For any old thing…..’ See p. 29: ‘ Not any old thing’.
‘turkey-hen dying’. At Roussillon?
29. ‘my next vice-exister will be a billy in the bowl’. Billycan?? This looks forward to the next story but one, in the Rue Brancion. See p 70: a billybowl of thorns.
Tellus: Roman earth-goddess who was later identified with the mother-goddess Cybele. But she doesn’t seem to hav been ‘thousand-breasted’. (The statue of Artemis at the Temple of Ephesus was many-breasted.)
30. ‘Having brought me to death's door (senile gangrene)’. When he was Malone?
‘scouring the earth for a hole to hide in’. See p. 126: ‘What is it? A little hole. You go down into it….’
‘spinach blue’??. (French: ‘cerne d'un bleu epinard’.)
‘that's jam’. (French: ‘ca c'est du nanan’. Yum-yum!)
31. Naevi: congenital pigmented areas on the skin; birthmarks.
‘I withdrew my adhesion’: I stopped being him.
32. ‘cramp just mentioned’. See p 31: the coils which ‘would come to an end for lack of room’
Rafflesia: the largest flower known (named after Sir Stamford Raffles, founder of Singapore). It is a malodorous parasite on a vine, rootless leafless and stemless. After seven days it becomes black and slimy. It is sometimes called the corpse flower.
‘my little ones born in my absence’. So they were someone else’s little ones, and correctly described on p. 39 as ‘little bastards’.
33. ‘a small rotunda - windowless, but well furnished with loopholes’. A skull?
‘periods’: menstrual periods. (French: les menstrues.)
‘Ptomaine’: the name of ‘little mother’. The word was coined by a 19th C Italian physician to describe sickness spread from corpses. ‘Any of various very often poisonous organic compounds formed by the action of putrefactive bacteria on nitrogen-containing matter.’ Ptoma (Greek) means fall, hence fallen body, hence corpse.
‘the whole ten or eleven of them’. But ‘grandpa, grandma, little mother and the eight or nine brats’ (above) makes eleven or twelve of them.
35. ‘Ptoto’: diminutive of Ptomaine. Toto is the dog in The Wizard of Oz.
‘I quote Malone’. Is there a specific reference to anything in Malone Dies.
Bat-horse: a horse which carried the baggage of an army officer. Bat (French} means pack-saddle. (L'Innommable: ‘une vieille carne de somme ou de trait’.)
36. ‘well-supplied with pain-killers’. See p.31: ‘to devour a narcotic’.
‘Ellman's Embrocation.’ Ellman the biographer of Joyce?
38. ‘the bacillus botulinus’. Botulism is poisoning by the botulinus toxin which is produced by the Clostridium botulinum bacteria. It is caused by eating improperly sterilized canned foods.
‘my adhesion’. See p 31.
Infundibuliform: funnel-shaped.
39. ‘beat in retreat’. 'beat a retreat’?
‘Isolde’s breast’. Isolde seems not to be one of the little bastards. She must be grandma!
41. ‘they’ve inflicted the notion of time on me’. See p.21: ‘years is one of Basil's ideas’.
42. ‘First I'll say what I'm not’. Somewhere in Beckett there is ‘define God in terms of what he is not’.
‘I'd wish they did’: I’d wish they did exist.
43. Helicoidal: spring-like.
‘the statue of the apostle of horse’s meat’. There used to be such a statue in the Rue Brancion. Reference?
45. Carrots, turnips: root vegetables. See Waiting for Godot.
Flakkee and Colmar Red are varieties of carrot. The district formerly known as Flakkee is part of the island of Goeree in the south of the Netherlands. Colmar is in Alsace. A museum there has a 15th century Last Supper painting of a red-bearded Judas by Gaspart Isermann. (Hence Colmar Red??)
‘her salad’. See ‘the services I rendered her lettuce’, above.
‘better still, I don’t know why, a swede’. Perhaps because of the philosopher Swedenborg, whom Kant read.
‘De nobis ipsis silemus’. Kant’s motto for second edition of his Critique. Origin?
47. ‘two phases of the same carnal envelope’. The carnal envelope is the dwelling for the spirit. The reincarnated spirit returns in a new carnal envelope.
‘that other old age’: Malone? 'that other middle age’: Molloy? ‘youth in which they had to give me up for dead’: Murphy?
48. ‘blue mirrors’: eyes.
49. ‘tumefaction of the penis’: of those who are hanged. See Waiting for Godot.
Manstuprating: masturbating with the hand. Masturbating: stimulating the genitals by any means besides intercourse.
Clydesdale: Scottish draught horse with heavily feathered legs. Suffolk: English breed of chestnut coloured draught horses.
50. ‘Slough off this mortal inertia’. See Hamlet: ‘shuffled off this mortal coil’.
Chap: jaw.
Bay of Naples: one of ‘the splendours of nature’ (above). Aubervilliers: an industrial town NE of Paris.
‘infarctus’. Infarct: an area of death in a tissue or organ resulting from obstruction of the local blood circulation.
‘they put me out of my agony’: ‘they’ have not previously intruded on the Rue Brancion.
Backers: sleeping partners. (French: commanditaires.)
52. ‘two falsehoods’. See p. 54: ‘two labours then’.
‘changing my tune’. See p.18.
‘before I can etc.’: ‘before being admitted to the peace where…’(above).
53. ‘the other voice’: as distinct from ‘they’. (See p.10: ‘the other advances full upon me’.) Is this (and ‘he alone’, p.54) Worm? ‘this solitary’ who is baptized Worm (p. 55)?
‘So nothing about me’: so I have received no information about me.
54. ‘Two labours then’. See p.52: ‘two falsehoods’
‘galley-man….. crawls between the thwarts’. See p.57: ‘I am he…..who crawls towards the thwarts.’ See p.123: ‘I no longer crawl between the thwarts’.
See Molloy (p.54): ‘I who had loved the image of old Geulincx, dead young,who left me free, on the black boat of Ulysses, to crawl towards the East, along the deck. That is a great measure of freedom, for him who has not the pioneering spirit.’ The Flemish philosopher Arnold Geulincx (1624-1669) held that although one can only do what God has willed one is free to accept this willingly or unwillingly. (Where in Geulincx is this reference?)
See How It Is (p.95): ‘…..I fall on my knees crawl forward clink of chains perhaps it’s not me perhaps it’s another perhaps it’s another voyage confusion with another…..’
‘It's like the other madness’: praying is like the other madness.
55. ‘give me a mother and let me suck her white’: because mammals suckle their young.
‘pinching my tits’. My tits? (French: ‘en me pincant les tetins’.)
56. ‘The problem of liberty too, as sure as fate’: fate is the opposite of liberty.
‘these two fomentors of fiasco’: Worm and Mahood?
tertius gaudens: a third party who rejoices.
‘squirming... at the end of the line’. Squirming like a fish who has taken the bait (which is Worm}? But a worm also squirms at the end of the line.
‘a sporting God’: God a fisherman holding the rod, Worm as bait, ‘I’ swallowing the hook
‘three hooks’: which three? see p. 57: ‘the third line falls plumb from the skies’.
57. ‘bleeding’: after biting the hook.
‘They'll surely bring me to the surface’: still like a fish being caught. But the word ‘fish’ is never used.
‘news of Worm.... I'll soon know if the other is still after me.’ Oh. I thought Worm and the other were the same. p 57. Is Mahood the other?
‘But even if he [the other] isn't [still after me] nothing will come of it: he [Worm? the other?] won't catch me, I won't be delivered from him (I mean Worm).’ So being caught involves being delivered from the catcher?
‘crawls between the thwarts’. Not a fish any longer! Pp.54 and 123.
‘The third line’. See p.56: ‘I've swallowed three hooks’. Which are the previous two?
‘That [my soul?] brings us up to four...’: which four? Worm, Mahood, my soul and...God? ‘We'll always be short of me’ - so ‘me’ is not one of the four.
‘gnawing of termites in my Punch and Judy box’ His puppets?
58. ‘the three of us’: not four any more?
‘in this direction’: in the direction of trying to be Worm?
‘Worm cannot note’: he is not a scribe.
Hippophagist: eater of horse-meat. Is Ducroix a name of some real man?
59. Marguerite: pearl, daisy, chrysanthemum. The first mention of her name?
‘cogitate’: Descartes, cogito ergo sum.
Now Marguerite is Madeleine.
60. ‘How.... can Mahood expect me to behave normally?’ So the speaker is not Mahood now.
61. ‘victim of a hallucination’ etc. Philosophical problem: how know that what we see is ‘real’?
‘enough of this cursed first person’. But the first person continues. There is a more successful attempt to eschew it from p.79 to p.89.
62. cang: a wooden yoke hung round a criminal's neck (in China), inscribed with a list of his offences.
‘real presence’, ‘substantiality’. In the catholic mass.
‘the sentence it [my substantiality] entails’: death?
63. ‘sequestrating me’. Seizing a debtor's property? Or putting away ? (‘stowed away’, below).
64. Marguerite again!
65. ‘all is a question of voices’. See p.66: ‘it is solely a question of voices’.
66. ‘he exists nevertheless: but not for himself, for others.’ ‘Worm is, since we conceive him.’ So Worm is now God-like (as Mahood was for Madeleine).
‘Others. One alone, then others.’ (French:‘Les hommes. Un seul, puis d'autres.’) ? ‘One [who? Worm?] turned towards the all-impotent.…towards him..who...is nothing’. A God-like entity turned towards a Godlike entity?
‘Who is not spared by the mad need to speak [French: ‘que n’epargne pas la rage de parler’.].….ignorant of his silence and silent’.?
‘What a velvet glove!’: how soft, how weak, are these words! [?]
67. ‘inexpungable’. Misprint for ‘inexpugnable’ (from Latin ‘pugna’): not able to be taken by assault.
68. Wistit: a small South American monkey; a marmoset.
69. ‘tenth-rate Toussaint L'Ouverture’. Toussaint was a rebel slave who ruled Haiti around 1800. He wrote many letters, but ‘wrote and spoke [French] poorly, usually employing the Creole patois and African tribal language’.
70. ‘that first disaster’. Presumably this disaster was when ‘I catch this sound that will never stop’ (p.69).
‘That will not last for ever.’ This same ‘sound that will never stop’?
‘gather while I may’: gather roses.
‘a billybowl of thorns’. Why a billybowl? See p.29: ‘my next vice-exister will be a billy in a bowl’ - ie in the jar in the Rue Brancion. Is Worm briefly back there now?
‘perfume-laden’. Perfume of roses? Or of farts?
72. Purveyors: caterers, suppliers. Purveyors of ‘all these titbits’.
73. ‘I begin by the ear’: begin by saying what I heard? See p.75: ‘How long did I remain a pure ear?’
‘Whereas ever since, what radiance!’ Ever since what? Since there was an ear? since I began?
‘Perhaps it’s Botal's Foramen.’ Foramen: a small anatomical opening or perforation (from Latin forare, to bore). Leonardo Botallo (born Asti, Piedmont c.1519, died 1587/88) re-discovered that the blood's passage from right to left side of the heart in the foetus was by way of the foramen ovale cordis (Botallo's foramen). His patron was Catherine de Medici. He was physician to Charles IX and Henri III. ‘Perhaps I'm not in a skull or a belly but in a part of a foetal heart which has no function after birth’. ‘All about me palpitates and labours’: at birth. See ‘never been properly born’ (Endgame, etc.).
74. ‘If I speak of a head’. He hasn't spoken of a head lately. But he will soon.
‘some other section of the conduit’: the conduit from head to lung, from mind to body, from outside to inside.
Fistula: an abnormal or surgically made passage leading from an abscess or hollow organ to the body surface or between hollow organs.
‘I wouldn't say no’: wouldn’t say no to their terms (above)? to bubbling with reason?
75. Irrefragable: irrefutable. From late Latin irrefragibilis (in + refragari (oppose).
‘when the eye joins in’: when sight comes, as well as hearing.
‘and worse than the evil, its treasure-house’. ?
76. ‘I shall not say I again’. He says it four more times immediately, then not until p. 89.
77. ‘the only noises…..are those of mouths?’: there are no noises of breathing.
‘The groaning of the air beneath the burden’: beneath the burden of words?
‘When on earth later on the storm rages’: in everyday life?
78. ‘The circumvolutionisation will be seen later, when they get him out’. Volution is a rolling or revolving motion; in architecture, a twist. The head will roll round later?
‘fill the rose of the winds’: fill all directions at once. (Rose: a rose-like card attached to compass showing the 32 points.) Mystical reference?
80. ‘But Worm will never know this joy but darkly (being less than a beast).’ Beasts would know the joy of dropping less darkly than Worm would?
81. ‘Indian file’. See pp.89 and 111.
‘gaffs, hooks, barbs, grapnels’. He’s a fish again!
82. Killarney: a beauty spot, somewhere that needs seeing.
83. ‘that’s grave (gravid)’. Gravid: pregnant (carrying eggs or young).
‘bugaboos’: bugbear, source of fear.
‘Ah mother of God, the things one has to listen to!’ See p 87: ‘Merciful God, the things one has to put up with!
‘Confusion…..pending the great confounding.’
‘With ruin upon ruin, rout on rout,
Confusion worse confounded.’ (Milton: Paradise Lost, Book 2.)
84. ‘embarrassing silence…. genuine hell’: that’s odd.
‘A man would wonder…. but Worm suffers only from the noise which prevents him from being what he was before. (Note the nuance!)’ The nuance is that Worm is not a man.
85. Naja: asian cobra
‘tedious equipoise’: between light and no light.
‘currish obscurity’. Why is obscurity currish, particularly?
86. ‘this impotent crystalline’.What is crystalline? The first eye since p. 79? I don't think so. What then?
‘Worth ten of Saint Anthony's pig's arse!’ Saint Anthony of Egypt, or Anthony the Abbot, 251-356, had a wild pig, the runt of a litter, which protected him in the wilderness during 24 years of torments by demon-beasts. Jacques Callot, 1592-1635, engraved (etched?) ‘The Temptations of Saint Anthony’ in 1633 (one print is in the Hermitage, St Petersburg). A detail shows one of the beasts sticking a bellows up the arse of Anthony's pig. (Where did Beckett see this?) Bosch's Temptation of Saint Anthony was much earlier (he died in 1516).
[detail from Callot’s ‘The Temptations of Saint Anthony’]
What has the pig’s arse got to do with it?
‘Worm waiting for his sweetheart!’ The sweetheart is the faithful visitor. Are the flowers in his sickroom?
‘look at the daisies! You’d think he was dead!’. Pushing up the daisies? (French: ‘ces marguerites’.)
87. ‘traltralay pom pom’. Some particular waltz?
‘too soon, to return, to where I am’: the ‘I’ since p. 79.
88. ‘I should have fled, Worm should have fled’: the last ‘I’ until p. 94.
‘It's like slime!’ See p. 89: ‘It’s like shit!’
89. ‘Indian file’: see pp. 81 and 111.
‘your material’: the material dug out from the holes.
‘It's like shit!’ See the mud in How It Is, Part Three: ‘all our shit’.
‘a question of elimination’: in both senses.
90. ‘the ozone…..sterilizes’. Ozone sterilizes air and water. But what has it to do with deserts, particularly?
91. One motto of William the Silent (1533-84) (who strove for Dutch independence from Spain) was: ‘It is not necessary to hope in order to undertake, nor to succeed in order to persevere.’ (Another motto was ‘saevis tranquillus in undis’: tranquil amidst the savage waves.) (William was called ‘the Silent’ because he said nothing when Henri II of France told him he intended to rout out the Protestants from the Netherlands.)
92. ‘the hussar gets up on a chair’. Reference?
‘lacking to my glory’. Biblical reference?
95. ‘that stet’. Stet: ‘let that stand’ (proof-reader’s mark). Referring to ‘listened’?
96. ‘I come, I come, my heart's delight.’ Any reference?
‘A little raw perhaps, the white, with all the pissing.’ Light has been pissing on the white of his eye?
‘paraphimotically globose’. Paraphimosis is when the foreskin gets locked behind the glans penis. (Greek ‘phimos’: a muzzle, or nose-band of a bridle.) ‘Phimosis exists when the maximum size of the preputial orifice is less than the maximum diameter of the glans on erection’. Globose: tending to be globular (botanical). The ‘trifle more prominent’ eye is more globular than it was: it’s like the glans when the foreskin is stuck behind it.
98. ‘spiked, in their pools, with a spear’. When are frogs thus spiked?
Aphonic: voiceless
100. ‘the master’: first mentioned on p. 23
103. ‘But my dear man’ to ‘you'll be all right you'll see’: addressing a man has ‘no identity’.
‘true for you’. (French: ‘c’est vrai’.)
‘look at this death's-head’: a police photograph?
‘without battery’: ‘assault and battery’ is a standard offence.
104. ‘I beg your pardon? Does he work?’ to ‘Look, here’s the photograph’: addressing a third party (concerning the man with no identity).
‘I assure you, it's a bargain.’ The speaker is trying to sell the man?
‘You'll see, you'll be all right...the only way out.’ Again addressed directly to the man with no identity? The ‘painful moment’ must be life.
‘I beg your pardon? Have I nothing else?’: addressing the third party once more.
‘if you were not rather.….’: rather uninquisitive?
‘What you don't understand?.….levity’: addressing the reader?
‘Yes I was right…..you all over’: addressing the man without identity.
‘Look here's the photograph.... I assure you’: addressing the third party.
105. ‘as he me’: as he coaxes me out
‘bullskrit’: a blend of ‘bullshit’ and ‘bullscript’? It’s ‘pidgin bullskrit’ because there is no verb.
106. ‘six and eight’: six shillings and eightpence.
‘flowers of rhetoric’: Pliny the Younger (62-113): ‘I have not altogether neglected the flowers of rhetoric of my favourite Marc-Tully.’
‘thousand flowers’: Mao Tse-Tung (May 1956) said ‘let a hundred flowers bloom, a hundred schools of thought contend’. Beckett translated L’Innommable into English in 1956-58. (French: ‘a vingt centavos les mille effets de manche’.)
‘the Pulitzer prize’. L'Innommable was written in 1949. In 1948 the Pulitzer Prize had gone to James A. Michener (1907-1997) for Tales of the South Pacific (published 1947). The musical South Pacific (April 1949) was based on it.
108. ‘bring back to the fold the dear lost lamb’. Is Worm the lost lamb?
‘my old quarry…him the second-last’. Mahood?
‘my dear tormentor: his turn to suffer’. See the victims and tormentors in ‘How It Is’.
109. ‘They'll never catch me, never stop trying.’ See p.110: ‘link, link’.
‘you came too early (here we'd need Latin)’. The Latin ‘immaturus’ (meaning ‘too early’)?
110. ‘And now for the it : I prefer that’. In L’Innommable this follows ‘Voila pour le vous, nous voila fixe, sur le vous’ - which is not translated here. See Malone Dies: ‘I think I shall be able to tell myself four stories….. One about a man, another about a woman, a third about a thing…..’
‘that’s right, link, link’: the link is to the first paragraph on p.109 (after the distraction of the ‘audience’ episode).
111. ‘Say something else, for me to hear (I don’t know how), for me to say (I don’t know how).’ He doesn’t know how to hear or to say because (p.110) ‘I don't feel a mouth on me…. I don’t feel an ear’.
‘He's mewled, he’ll rattle - it’s mathematical.’ He’s mewled (like a new-born baby), so it’s mathematically certain he'll rattle (when he dies).
‘in Indian file’. See pp. 81 and 89.
113. ‘locomotor ataxy’: locomotor ataxia is a ‘tertiary syphilitic disorder of the nervous system marked esp by disturbances of gait and difficulty in coordinating voluntary muscle movements.’ (No doubt this was Watt's complaint.)
‘rigor’: rigidness or insensitivity of organs or tissue.
‘emergal of the bony structure’. Bones becoming prominent as flesh disintegrates? Is ‘emergal’ a forensic term?
‘nothing doable to be done’. See p.115.
115 ‘something doable to do’. See p.116.
‘A moment ago I had no thickness!’ See p.111: ‘I’m the partition, I’ve two surfaces and no thickness.’
116. ‘Tell me what you're doing and I'll ask you how it's possible.’ See p.111: ‘Tell me what you feel and I'll tell you who I am.’
119. ‘doing any old thing to pass the time’. See p.114: ‘any old thing, the same old thing, to pass the time’.
120. ‘Something has changed nevertheless.’ See p.129: ‘But has nothing really changed, all this time?’
‘far from my doors’. See pp. 124 and 147-151 (doors). The doors could be death's doors.
121. ‘Strange this mixture of solid and liquid.’ Repeated on p.123.
123. ‘this latest surrogate, his head splitting with vile certainties’: the ‘I’ of p.122 has a head ‘where all manner of things are known’
‘Strange this mixture of solid and liquid!’ See p 121.
‘his doll's eyes’. See p. 122: ‘two, perhaps blue’.
‘crawl between the thwarts’. See pp 54 and 57.
‘a lake beneath the earth’. Dante? Kubla Khan?
‘aloft at less than a score of fathoms men come and go’. Is there a specific reference? (See How It Is: images ‘above in the light’.)
‘owl cooped in the grotto in Battersea Park’: there must have been an owl there in the 1930's. See p. 4: ‘gazing before me like a great barn-owl’.
‘under the elms in se, murmuring Shelley - impervious to the shafts’. Obscure! (Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley were published by Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown. And ‘orme’ means ‘elm’. No? But what else?) (French: ‘sous les ormes en soi, en se citant Shelley, insensible aux fleches’.)
124. ‘I can't go on in any case. But I must go. So I'll go on.’ The first whisper of the last theme ( pp.126 and 151).
126. ‘But I must go on’. See pp 124 and 151.
128. ‘It's my walls.’ See p.121: ‘far from my walls’.
129. Homology: correspondence in structure but not necessarily in function.
132. ‘the others have vanished’. See p.144: ‘the others are gone, they have been stilled’.
‘If it begins to mean something I can’t help it.’ See Waiting for Godot (or Endgame).
‘Tunis pink’. A standard colour?
133. ‘I should have avoided this bright stain.’
‘Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the bright radiance of eternity.’ (Shelley: Adonais.)
134. ‘be this slow boundless whirlwind and every particle of its dust’. See p.136: ‘Now it’s slush, a minute ago it was dust. It must have rained.’
135. ‘In the end it coms to that, to the survival of that alone.’ What is ‘that’, exactly?
‘Someone says ‘I’, unbelieving.’ See p.1: ‘I, say I. Unbelieving.’
Apodosis: the main clause of a conditonal sentence.
136. ‘a minute ago it was dust’. See p.134: ‘every particle of its dust’.
139. ‘Ah if I could laugh!.....one of those gifts that can't be acquired.’ See Watt (Olympia Press 1958, p.26): ‘Watt had watched people smile and thought he understood how it was done.’
141. ‘They love each other, marry....’ Whence this plot? From some specific novel?
142. ‘lepping fresh’: Irishism. ‘Dante and the Lobster’ (Beckett): ‘Lepping fresh, sir,’ said the man. ‘First Love’ (Beckett): If it’s lepping, I said, it’s not mine.
‘Hee hee! (That’s the Abderite - no the other).’ One Abderite (a native of Abdera in Thrace) was Protagoras (485-410 BC), who said ‘man is the measure of all things’. The other was Democritus (c.470-380 BC), who said everything was made of atoms. Democritus was called the laughing philosopher: Seneca said he never appeared in public without laughing and expressing contempt at human follies.
143. Macerate (intransitive): to soften and wear away. ‘Not the one [the silence] where I macerate up to the mouth…..: [but] that [the silence] of the drowned.’
‘The comma will come where I'll drown for good.’ The force of this is not helped by my punctuation…..
144. ‘Enormous prison, like a hundred thousand cathedrals.’ A curious simile. Any reference?
‘I'll be as gone’: I'll be as gone as the others are gone. See p.132: ‘the others have vanished’.
145. ‘lashed to a rock’: Prometheus.
148: ‘Or fingers’: or [perhaps it’s] fingers [not a cord] .
‘a drop’: a platform on a gallows.
151. ‘the way (in colour)’: in colour because it’s been described so vividly in the stories?
‘his story the story to be told’: his story [would be] the story to be told.