Play It Again, Sam
Judging by the morass of Google results on the subject, Beckett’s must/can’t/will-go-on line is so widely and variously (mis-)quoted and (mis-)attributed (is it in Watt? Molloy? Endgame? The Unnameable? Are these words, whichever exact words they may happen to be, the final words of The Unnameable? For goodness’ sake, someone with a copy of the book to hand go and look it up! And no smart-arseing about how he wrote it in French originally anyway…) that it forms a kind of collective screen memory for Beckett’s work as a whole: a six-(give-or-take-a-few-)word summary that one can trot out as a relaxing alternative to having to endure the trauma of Beckett’s actual prose…
August 8th, 2006 at 12:51 pm
Ummmm, I guess that I had considered the French, because I was curious about whether the ‘you’ was translated from the French ‘on’, as in ‘one’ or ‘we’, or whether it’s directed at somebody as in ‘tu.’ Can anyone clear this up for certain? It’s not that I wouldn’t love to read the play, it’s just that I have a thesis to write.
August 8th, 2006 at 2:39 pm
Well so do I! (the thesis-writing I mean).
Anyway, as the oddly-shaped corner of the web’s resident Beckett pedant…I know why there’s a confusion here. It’s becaus of the similarity of two phrases right at the very end of The Unnamable (no ‘e’ in the title, btw!) – I have put them in bold in the following final passage from the English version (translated from the French by the author with Patrick Bowles – though I have a feeling Bowles mostly collaborated with SB on Molloy, rather than Malone Dies or the Unnamable.
‘…they’re going to stop, I know that well, I can feel it, they’re going to abandon me, it will be the silence, for a moment, a good few moments, or it will be mine, the lasting one, that didn’t last, that still lasts, it will be I, you must go on, I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.
See?
August 8th, 2006 at 2:46 pm
Sorry, it should be The Unnamable (it’s a novel, not a play, btw wesley).
The French (L’innommable), just to be hyper-scholastic, apologies, for the two lines is:
‘il faut continuer, je ne peux continuer, il faut continuer, je vais donc continuer’
and ‘il faut continuer, je ne peux pas continuer, je vais continuer.’
Dominic, your point, namely, ‘it forms a kind of collective screen memory for Beckett’s work as a whole: a six-(give-or-take-a-few-)word summary that one can trot out as a relaxing alternative to having to endure the trauma of Beckett’s actual prose…’ Is quite right. I list some other commonly-quoted Beckett ‘lines’ in my paper on SB and Stoicism:
‘Throughout all his plays, prose works and poems, we often have a vague idea of Beckett as a sort of ironically stoic writer, particularly if we remember some of his most famous and oft-quoted phrases: ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ (The Unnamable), ‘fail again, fail better’ (Worstward Ho), ‘you’re on earth, there’s no cure for that!’ (Endgame). Beckett is often portrayed as a writer railing in some small way against the absurdity of the universe, or depicting an oppressive cosmos in which mothers ‘give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more’ (Waiting for Godot).’
Obviously I think that Beckett is mandatory reading for every single rational being, and the irrational ones too.
August 9th, 2006 at 12:14 am
Wow great thanks for the info, for my part. So would you translate ‘il faut continuer’ in the same way that he has?
August 9th, 2006 at 12:58 am
All the best for job-hunting by the way. Was wondering, do you know how much attention your prospective employers have paid to your blog?
August 9th, 2006 at 1:15 am
Oh just saw your posts about the job-hunting process that suggest that you don’t let them know about it. Thanks anyway.
August 9th, 2006 at 10:15 am
Well, given the infinitely attractive nature of Beckett’s notoriously non-literal translations of his own work, I’m not sure it matters how anyone else would translate it…
But ‘il faut continuer’ would normally be translated as ‘it is necessary to go on’ or (perhaps more appropriately in this case) ‘one must go on’, rather than ‘you must’ (the Fr. thus has the weight of a somewhat more of a neutral impersonal imperative than the English, which is interesting if you wanted to stress the indirect nature of the imperative to…what? write? ‘go on’?).
August 10th, 2006 at 12:31 pm
ah, what’s happening to my comments?
Wesley.
August 10th, 2006 at 1:58 pm
My apologies: it looks like my over-zealous spam cop has misidentified them as spam; it’s also deleted – apparently irrecoverably – the ones that were over 5 days old.
This is not a matter of deliberate policy! I will be keeping an eye on it from now on. Poetix values all its contributors, apart from the ones who post the same fucking advert for herbal viagra (or whatever it is) repeatedly on every post, in Chinese.
August 10th, 2006 at 5:33 pm
I am ontologically not a troll then…fantastic. The big spam other doesn’t want me voided…yet.
Dominic – the waitress called me ‘darling’ as we left. I think we have found our spiritual home, part-way between Alice in Wonderland’s cup-size-changing, Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’ and Aeroflot. Excellent.
August 11th, 2006 at 12:59 am
So that makes me a troll, Infinite Thought? In any case, I had considered that it might be a deliberate policy, so that it’s come to be relieving to know that it’s only the big other.
August 11th, 2006 at 9:15 am
Wesley! Of course not, I was just being silly about the big other spam killer.
I sincerely hope no one who will ever employ me (ha!) will ever look at my blog. It is supposed to be anonymous, though it’s easier than it should be to work out who I ‘really’ am….if only I knew!