molloy:basara

There is a familial relationship between Beckett’s Malone and Basara’s Fritz in Chinese Letter: the father and the son. I feel a familiarity with Basara through youth – Fritz's struggle with the imperative to write reminds me of my own. His is a clever Oulipian exercise of two intimidating + possibly-imagined men demanding a hundred pages of writing, any writing at all.

It is a paean to schizophrenic thought, often comic. Basara presents an image of thought that is cast out, clinicized, operated on. In the same way literature itself has its scalpel to writers, there is an imperative to entertain, to have purpose, to present a story. Fritz as writer and human is presented as an affliction, something to be treated, a malignant growth, a tumor. His risk is that his worthless hundred pages will be unreadable, and his effort will be completely futile. How many Fritzs are out there?

Yet Beckett the father remains in a certain sense unapproachable to me.

Plot, character, setting – these anachronisms bore us. We can no longer honestly depict the psychologically-driven bourgeoisie subject that emerged with the rise of the novel in the 19^th century. Benjamin writes that bourgeois institutions "make it possible for people to avoid the sight of the dying." This applies to institutions of health and of art. These same clinical and literary institutions play key roles in both texts: both Molloy & Fritz write in part to resist the clinical, psychological, and ideological influences that alter and destroy what makes them unique, what makes them subject. They also struggle against the novel itself.

Eternity + death are very big subjects. Beckett, by focusing on the small death of Molloy in dismal+scrutinizing detail, gives us a perspective on death-itself without euphemizing, packaging or commodifying death. For Molloy, nothing is more real than nothing. His nihilism, groundlessness, and close proximity to death as an individual stand in stark contrast to the antiseptic & comforting Whispering Glades in Waugh's Loved One, the great satyric necropolis, a theme park for death. Commercializing death is a cannibal act.

Nothing will be bought or sold at the death of Molloy + Fritz, nothing of real value. And yet these are texts that give American students a different perspective and meaning to their own lives and death. By giving voice to an invalid and a schizophrenic, these authors show how to understand our own contingent, subjective perspective + uniqueness in the world. These are lines of resistance to the dominant mode of thought. Beckett allows us the chance to reflect, and perhaps take a course more in tune with the currents life has given us & with our own individual natures.