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WORKS BY SAMUEL BECKETT PUBLISHED BY GROVE PRESS
Cascando
Collected Poems
in English and French
The Collected Shorter Plays
of Samuel Beckett
Company
Disjecta
Endgame
Ends and Odds
First Love and Other Stories
Happy Days
How It Is
I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On
Krapp’s Last Tape
The Lost Ones
Malone Dies
Mercier and Camier
Molloy
More Pricks Than Kicks
Murphy
Nohow On: (Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho)
Ohio Impromptu
Proust
Rockaby
Stories and Texts for Nothing
Three Novels
Waiting for Godot
Watt
Worstward Ho
ALSO PUBLISHED BY GROVE PRESS
Happy Days: Samuel Beckett’s Production Notebooks, edited by James Knowlson
Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose, 1929–1989, edited and with an introduction and notes by S. E. Gontarski
The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: Endgame, edited by S. E. Gontarski
The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: Krapp’s Last Tape, edited by James Knowlson
The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot, edited by Dougald McMillan and James Knowlson
Company,
Ill Seen Ill Said,
Worstward Ho
Three Novels by Samuel Beckett
With an Introduction by S. E. Gontarski
Company copyright © 1980 by Samuel Beckett
Ill Seen Ill Said copyright © 1981 by Les Editions de Minuit; translation copyright © 1981 by Samuel Beckett
Worstward Ho copyright © 1983 by Samuel Beckett
Introduction copyright © 1996 by S. E. Gontarski
Jacket photograph © Miroslav Zajíc/CORBIS
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Ill Seen Ill Said was first published in French as Mal vu mal dit
by Les Editions de Minuit, Paris, France, 1981
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN: 0-8021-3426-2
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8021-9834-1
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
The Conjuring of Something out of Nothing:
Samuel Beckett’s “Closed Space” Novels
. . . this seemed rather to belong to some story heard long before, an instant in the life of another, ill told, ill heard, and more than half forgotten. Watt
In the mid-1960s, Samuel Beckett’s fiction took a dramatic turn, away from stories featuring the compulsion to (and so solace in) motion, toward stories featuring stillness or some barely perceptible movement, at times just the breathing of a body or the trembling of a hand. These “closed space” stories often entailed little more than the perception of a figure in various postures, like an exercise in human origami. The journey theme had been a mainstay of Beckett’s fiction from Murphy and Watt, and it culminated in the body of French fiction: the four French Stories of 1946; the three collected novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable; the fictive fragments written to move beyond the impasse of The Unnamable, collected as Texts for Nothing; and the great post–Unnamable novel, How It Is. Motion offered a degree of solace to Beckett’s “omnidolent” creatures: “As long as I kept walking I didn’t hear [the cries] because of the footsteps,” the narrator of First Love reminds us. But it was the fact of movement rather than any particular destination that consoled, as the narrator of From an Abandoned Work makes clear: “I have never in my life been on my way anywhere, but simply on my way.” The shift from journeys, a movement from and return to some shelter or haven—often “home”—to the “closed space” tales was announced in the fragments and faux départs that eventually developed into All Strange Away (1963–64) and its sibling, Imagination Dead Imagine (1965): “Out the door and down the road in the old hat and coat like after the war, no not that again.” The more imaginative alternative was now: “A closed space five foot square by six high, try for him there.” The change necessitated a new character as well, the nameless “him” who became Beckett’s second major fictional innovation. The first was “voice,” that progressive disintegration of literary character that dominated the journey fictions from Watt through From an Abandoned Work and included most of Beckett’s major novels—and made occasional appearances in “closed space” tales like Company and Ill Seen Ill Said, for instance. The second was “him,”