Introduction

Samuel Beckett’s Mulloy listens, “and the voice is of a world endlessly collapsing.” ¹ It is the voice of modern literature. Beckett takes us into the vertiginous heart of the wasteland. His heroes (Malone, for instance) seek “the rapture of vertigo, the letting go, the fall, the gulf, the relapse to darkness, to nothingness.” ² The source of the apocalyptic vision in Beckett is the peculiar nature of the self, the I which is “streaming and emptying away as through a sluice.” ³ Malone at one point speaks of “a blind and tired hand delving feebly in my particles and letting them trickle between its fingers.” ⁴ This hand ransacks and ravages Malone out of the sheer frustration of not being able to “scatter” him with one sweep. The tired hand will ultimately kill Malone, but not immediately, as it would like: meanwhile, Malone’s life is the suffering that comes from the stirring, waking, fondling, clutching, ransacking, and ravaging of the hand—the hand, we may imagine, of Beckett’s God.