In his sly and funny critical study, Beckett’s Dying Words (1993), Christopher Ricks draws our attention to a key feature of Beckett’s existential and linguistic vision: exhaustion. This isn’t just the exhaustion of his increasingly decrepit characters, but the exhaustion of language, the way it drags along the dead weight of cliché and hackneyed phrases. Beckett is our great zombie fiction writer, only his zombie is language itself. This makes him the diametrical opposite of the mad scientist of literary prose, James Joyce, whom he served as amanuensis in the thirties. Beckett’s first two novels are heavily influenced by Joyce. In order to replace his mentor’s exuberance with lethargy, and profusion with scarcity, Beckett took the drastic decision to write in French. He imposed constraints on himself. And it was in French that he created his best fiction: several short stories and the novel trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable). Beckett’s short story ‘First Love’, originally written in French towards the end of the war, wasn’t published until the 1970s, by which time Beckett’s valedictory manner had desiccated to a knotty and rather tedious minimalism. Unlike those late works, ‘First Love’ is intensely entertaining, a low comedy of failure, inertia and bewilderment. Its title makes you expect a touching coming-of-age stake in the manner of, say, Turgenev. But love, to Beckett’s narrator, is as remote a prospect as regular employment.
First published as Premier Amour by Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1970. First published in English, translated by the author, by Calder and Boyars, London, 1973
A Personal Anthology 