Anthony Cordingley

Beckett’s “Masters”: Pedagogical Sadism, Foreign Language Primers, Self-Translation

Beckett’s Unnamable cannot escape the disquieting sense that his life is but a ‘‘pensum’’—a repetitive, dreary lesson dealt out by a schoolmaster. He asks himself, ‘‘But who are these maniacs let loose on me from on high for what they call my good.’’ These ‘‘maniacs’’ swarm about his consciousness and take hold of his tongue: ‘‘I have no language but theirs.’’ Indeed, a perplexing feature of Beckett’s post–World War II novels is their narrators’ strange perception that a voice (or such voices) encroaches on their speech, usurping its agency. The presence of these voices increases with each of the three major novels Beckett wrote in French after 1945 and translated into English—Molloy (1950/55), Malone meurt/Malone Dies (1951/ 56) and L’innommable/The Unnamable (1952/58). In Beckett’s next and final novel, Comment c’est/How It Is (1961/64), the ‘‘I’’ abdicates authority over his speech entirely, claiming to do nothing but ‘‘quote’’ his ‘‘ancient voice in me not mine.’’ In so doing he gives full expression to the first-person dyad that Beckett termed the ‘‘narrator/narrated.’’ Scholarship of Beck-