The Nether World of No

STORIES AND TEXTS FOR NOTHING by Samuel Beckett. 140 pages. Grove. $5.

Some writers chronicle men on their way up; others tackle men on their way down. Samuel Beckett stalks after men on their way out. Bereft of eternity, he writes of the unending ravages of time. His characters stumble through a sludgy limbo, out of life but not quite into death, "without the courage to end or the strength to go on." Nothing happens; nobody comes, nobody goes. Yet his plays (Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape) and novels (Malloy, Murphy) are metaphors of modern man's spiritual bafflement. "Waiting for Godot" has become a tagline for frustration.

Beckett's champions argue that his threnodies in dusky twilight represent the existential metaphor of the human condition, that the thin but unwavering voices of his forlorn characters speak the ultimate statement of affirmation, if only because the merest attempt at communication is itself affirmation. His crit ics believe that no literary bridge can be built on so shaky a foundation. Looking out across his bleak, windless landscapes, they see nothing but nihilism.

Stories and Texts for Nothing provides evidence for both camps. The three short stories and 13 shorter fragments are all of the typical "no" piece of his novels, featuring the nameless "I" character--or noncharacter. In one story, a decrepit figure, whose hat covers a pustule on top of his skull, is expelled from his boardinghouse and wanders until he comes to rest in a cab in a stable. In another story, a tortured soul gradually constructs his own coffin by hammering boards across the top of an abandoned rowboat.

In spite of the hints of movement in these stories and texts, all is really paralytic stasis--except for the voices, the indomitable voices, droning on. They are at once the final buffers and the last instruments capable of registering anguish: "Only the words break the silence, all other sounds have ceased . . . my words are my tears, my eyes my mouth."

Beckett's voices, now mocking, now doubting, always carry their own special lyricism: "Where would I go, if I could go, who would I be, if I could be, what would I say, if I had a voice, who says this, saying it's me?" And perhaps to understand Beckett's sullen craft and art fully, it is best to recall that age during which all human voices almost automatically speak poetry--childhood. Then, too, the voice is a plaything, a comforter in the dark. In spite of his tottering old men, Beckett is more the toddler; he is the child at bedtime who says "No!" with all of his heart and then gently holds out his hand. And like the child, too, in his awful ambivalence, he is beyond--and before--judgment, so close does he tread on that nether world between creation and destruction.

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