Collected Prose

or as bidden from within.”
    This notion of time, of course, is directly related to the notion of timing , and it seems no accident that Mercier and Camier immediately precedes Waiting for Godot in Beckett’s oeuvre. In some sense, it can be seen as a warm-up for the play. The music-hall banter, which was perfected in the dramatic works, is already present in the novel:
What will it be? said the barman.
When we need you we’ll tell you, said Camier.
What will it be? said the barman.
The same as before, said Mercier.
You haven’t been served, said the barman.
The same as this gentleman, said Mercier.
The barman looked at Camier’s empty glass.
I forget what it was, he said.
I too, said Camier.
I never knew, said Mercier.

    But whereas Waiting for Godot is sustained by the implicit drama of Godot’s absence — an absence that commands the scene as powerfully as any presence — Mercier and Camier progresses in a void. From one moment to the next, it is impossible to foresee what will happen. The action, which is not buoyed by any tension or intrigue, seems to take place against a background of nearly total silence, and whatever is said is said at the very moment there is nothing left to say. Rain dominates the book, from the first paragraph to the last sentence (“And in the dark he could hear better too, he could hear the sounds the long day had kept from him, human murmurs for example, and the rain on the water”) — an endless Irish rain, which is accorded the status of a metaphysical idea, and which creates an atmosphere that hovers between boredom and anguish, between bitterness and jocularity. As in the play, tears are shed, but more from a knowledge of the futility of tears than from any need to purge oneself of grief. Likewise, laughter is merely what happens when tears have been spent. All goes on, slowly waning in the hush of time, and unlike Vladimir and Estragon, Mercier and Camier must endure without any hope of redemption.
    The key word in all this, I feel, is dispossession. Beckett, who begins with little, ends with even less. The movement in each of his works is toward a kind of unburdening, by which he leads us to the limits of experience — to a place where aesthetic and moral judgments become inseparable. This is the itinerary of the characters in his books, and it has also been his own progress as a writer. From the lush, convoluted, and jaunty prose of More Pricks than Kicks (1934) to the desolate spareness of The Lost Ones (1970), he has gradually cut closer and closer to the bone. His decision thirty years ago to write in French was undoubtedly the crucial event in this progress. This was an almost inconceivable act. But again, Beckett is not like other writers. Before truly coming into his own, he had to leave behind what came most easily to him, struggle against his own facility as a stylist. Beyond Dickens and Joyce, there is perhaps no English writer of the past hundred years who has equalled Beckett’s early prose for vigor and intelligence; the language of Murphy , for example, is so packed that the novel has the density of a short lyric poem. By switching to French (a language, as Beckett has remarked, that “has no style”), he willingly began all over again. Mercier and Camier stands at the very beginning of this new life, and it is interesting to note that in this English translation Beckett has cut out nearly a fifth of the original text. Phrases, sentences, entire passages have been discarded, and what we have been given is really an editing job as well as a translation. This tampering, however, is not difficult to understand. Too many echoes, too many ornate and clever flourishes from the past remain, and though a considerable amount of superb material has been lost, Beckett apparently did not think it good enough to keep.
    In spite of this, or perhaps because of this, Mercier and Camier comes close to being a flawless work. As with all of Beckett’s self-translations, this version is not so much a literal translation of the original as a re-creation, a “repatriation” of the book into English. However stripped his style in French may be, there is always a little extra something added to the English renderings, some slight twist of diction or nuance, some unexpected word falling at just the right moment, that reminds us that English is nevertheless Beckett’s home.
    George, said Camier, five sandwiches, four wrapped and one on the side. You see, he said, turning