Customer Reviews

Murphy

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4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Murphy is a novel unlike any other. Quite deliberately, Beckett's characters are not portrayed with realistic fullness, and the plot is fragmented and incomplete. Nevertheless, this is an enjoyable read if conventional expectations are suspended. Beckett's early work is often compared to Joyce, but they are actually very different. Beckett's works are essentially tragic-comic. There is one passage that perfectly encapsulates the problem of desire:

"I greatly fear," said Wylie, "that the syndrome known as life is too diffuse to admit of palliation. For every symptom that is eased, another is made worse. The horse leech's daughter is a closed system. Her quantum of wantum cannot vary."

Beckett considered this passage important enough to repeat twice in his novel. Murphy, the protagonist of this novel, realizes in effect that desire can never be satisfied, and so he simply withdraws from life, attempting to reach a state of catatonic stupor. His girlfriend tries with tragic pathos to draw him back into life, but her attempts are doomed to failure. Murphy's friends are all similar to himself, fragmented and incomplete. The novel's vision is absurdist, tragic, and existentialist--humans are "windowless monads," doomed to isolation and misunderstanding. Beckett's achievement consists primarily in the brilliantly original language used to communicate his vision. Like Shakespeare or any great poet, his work cannot be summarized but must be experienced.

Murphy, as these other Amazon critics have suggested, is not Beckett's greatest work. Perhaps, though, it is his most lovable book, the last time he seemed to care so deeply about his characters. The final chapter even verges on sentiment-- and whoever accused Beckett of that?

This is Beckett before he became the Beckett of fame, before he began stripping away all excesses. This is Beckett before the war, when he was still writing in English, when he was still under the influence of Joyce. Others have noted the facts. But the truth is that Beckett, even in the adolescence of his genius, was a strong enough writer to forge his own consciousness.

A writer below commends the first sentence, and I concur. It's a beauty, recalling the verses of Ecclesiastes and foreshadowing the grim honesty of Beckett's future sentences.

For a reader curious about Samuel Beckett, Murphy is a good place to start.

What is fascinating about a work such as this is the absolute division of opinions regarding the importance of this book. Murphy is a style unto itself. It is a story without an internal plot. The character Murphy is fueled only by his desire to desire nothing, and in search of this goal seem to get nowhere. The real message of the book is based solely in the question of existence. While Beckett does borrow and steal quite a bit of idealology form other notables, his expression of the Mind/Body Split and the concepts of the Id, Ego, And Superego, leave me stunned and hollow inside. An intense read, I reccomend a single sitting of about 5 hours, and have a friend or two read it seperately, then discuss. It can change your life. P.S. Beckett would think it absurd that I feel this strongly about his book.

Apart from umpteen times during my salad days I haven't read this novel in many a long year but I am actually at long last currently on the verge of undertaking yet again the welcome burden of carrying off under me oxter this priceless parcel of ash. "It must have weighed well on four pounds." That's a real figure from very near the end, a quote I suppose, I remember it almost word for word, on account of what happens after in the bar when Cooper takes great offence and the leftovers of Murphy, in a sort of sack at this stage, take flight so to speak. Almost word for word and no error, the darkly funny and superbly written dénouement of chapter 12, Cooper trying to dispose of the incinerated Irish gladiator's mortal remains:

"He was turning into the station, without having met any considerable receptacle for refuse, when a burst of music made him halt and turn. It was the pub across the way, opening for the evening session. The lights sprang up in the saloon, the doors burst open, the jukebox struck up. He crossed the street and stood on the threshold. The floor was palest ochre, the pin-tables shone like silver, the quoits board had a net, the stools the high rungs that he loved, the whiskey was in glass tanks, a slow cascando of pellucid yellows. A man brushed past him into the saloon, one of the millions that had been wanting a drink for the past two hours. Cooper followed slowly and sat down at the bar, for the first time in more than twenty years.

'What are you taking, friend?' said the man. 'The first is mine,' said Cooper, his voice trembling.

Some hours later Cooper took the packet of ash from his pocket, where earlier in the evening he had put it for greater security, and threw it angrily at a man who had given him great offence. It bounced, burst, off the wall on to the floor, where at once it became the object of much dribbling, passing, trapping, shooting, punching, heading and even some recognition from the gentleman's code. By closing time the body, mind and soul of Murphy were freely distributed over the floor of the saloon."

Simply smashing stuff that is--even though for vaguely personal reasons I substituted jukebox for radio--but hold on a minute here, since I haven't exactly started properly yet at the beginning I'll fark right off now and come back when I really am done and done. Early Beckett, wha'? Sure you can't beat nor best this man's writing from any bleeding period.

November 12: The first thing to say I suppose is the very first paragraph of Murphy is justly celebrated. This remarkable opening salvo is generally considered--at least in certain quarters--to be composed of five of the finest first five sentences in the history of scribbling. That at any rate is certainly one of my own convictions. But the odd thing is it's not this opening paragraph on page 1 that bangs a gong now but that sentence on page 2, the one about the pleasure consequent on the body's appeasement, the sentence where the author directly confesses the following about the life of his creation, the moribund Murphy: "And life in his mind gave him pleasure, such pleasure that pleasure was not the word."

Although as utterly gobsmacked as this left me I needn't tell you that when I read on the next page all about Murphy's esteemed mentor Neary and the uses to which he, Neary, put the gift given him of stopping his heart more or less whenever he liked--the rare trick to be used sparingly and only in situations irksome beyond endurance, such "as when he wanted a drink and could not get one, or fell among Gaels and could not escape"--well I hardly need add that I stood straight up in my eight-eyed Doc Martens and laughed till I stopped.

November fifteen: Neary to Murphy:

"'The love that lifts up it eyes,' said Neary, 'being in torments; that craves for the tip of her little finger, dipped in lacquer, to cool its tongue--is foreign to you, Murphy, I take it.'

'Greek,' said Murphy."

I'm not making this up, it's right there on page 5. Hard on the heels too halfway back up the same page of Murphy's equally snappy retort to Neary's desperate call for the merest fifteen minutes with a certain Miss Dwyer:

"'And then?' said Murphy. 'Back to Teneriffe and the apes?'"

Murphy's a smart one alright.

November 22, 2009: Done and done. Done too at last talking about the man Murphy--Hell roast this figment, I shill niver fergit him! Curiously enough though it's Celia this time through that figures particularly. If in all fairness Murphy is the head of this wonderful novel, Celia is its wayward heart, to say nothing of its hips, etc. The chapters properly hers, 2 and 13, are a mournful wonder to re-read, which I've just done while sitting on a bench outside the railings of Centennial Park in the sun, smoking. Celia and her grandfather and the prospect of flying that kite right out of sight. The tired heart. These chapters are well placed too to temper the ghastly merriment of this otherwise achingly funny history of that poorly starred native, Murphy. "All out," cry the park rangers. Krapp impatiently rewinding the tape to listen agog again to his younger self speak of the girl in the punt that day on the lake made a strong impression and one that's somehow faintly prefigured here in the solemn attentions paid to Celia. Murphy's a sharp one alright.

This novel's often been neglected by comparison with the prose and drama after WWII, but admirers of Flann O'Brien's wit and slapdash satire sprinkled with Joycean erudition and unpredictable characters will find enough to admire. (N.B.: Four stars by comparison with what follows, which in hindsight will allow us better to appreciate what this novel sets in motion for Beckett's rise to mastery over his domain.) Already, the references veer towards obscurity, the vocabulary stretches for the archly observed and the totally original phrase, and while the author, just entering his thirties, already possesses the mordant perspective on life and love, there's a coltish kicking about the familiar realms of flat and asylum, city park and pub, that keep you tethered to a somewhat recognizable setting of Dublin (best not mention Cork) and London.

As with "Watt," the learning's considerable and not always comprehensible to those of us less gifted or leg-pulling than Beckett or Joyce; many critics tend to see the student trying to match his teacher, but I see more a proto-O'Brien voice, enamored with weary cliché and existentialist horror, utter dread and light mockery, character-type send-ups and human foibles. There's a poetic sense of life's fragility amidst the sharpened exchanges of cruelty and cant. "He thought of the four caged owls in Battersea Park, whose joys and sorrows did not begin until dusk." (106) "Is it its back that the moon can never turn to the earth, or its face?" (131) "Each leaf as it fell had an access of new life, a sudden frenzy of freedom at contact with the earth, before it lay down with the others." (150)

Who has not felt like Murphy? "For what was working for a living but a procuring and a pimping for the money-bags, one's lecherous tyrants the money-bags, so that they might breed?" (76) Or, known the backstabbing ridicule we do to each other, as Celia watches him retreat, perhaps from her forever: "His figure so excited the derision of a group of boys playing football in the road that they stopped their game. She watched him multiplied in their burlesque long after her eyes could see him no more." (143)

The novel's plot focuses less on the protagonist than you may expect, and follows mostly those who pursue him from Dublin over to London, all bent on manipulating him while betraying each other. Murphy's "unredeemed split self" gains much attention, and the sixth chapter's depiction of his spherical mind, dark, light, and half-lit, signals Beckett's signature concern for his later works. The mind-body problem haunts everyone here, from kite-loving Mr. Kelly at the Round Pond to one-eyed, hat-wearing Cooper. Outer reality vs. interior sanctuary, as represented in the Magdalene Mental Mercyseat's inmates, attracts Murphy: "here was the race he had long since despaired of finding." (166)

Eventually, he will see nothing, literally. Endon's chess game ended, Murphy will meet his maker in spectacular sense, finding perhaps the freedom within the merging where light meets dark. For those who trail him to his departure, the problems continue, as for us all in our own narratives. Beckett's story for us may bewilder more than entertain, but even in what some dismiss as a rather juvenile effort, the immense questions of mortality, mentality, and human purpose in a crazy world in and out of the asylum prove this to be a rewarding, if off-kilter and nervously narrated, story of one's man's attempt to outrun his demons by rocking in his trusty chair towards his own enigmatic, inexplicable, and unverifiable enlightenment.

Not as powerful as the fiction he would write in the next decade in France, but funny. The self-conscious narration resembles some of the humor of Watt(in the footnotes and the appendix), but as it's chief expressive voice. Beckett tries to write about philosophy, probably why this is the least philosophically expressive novel of them all. There is actually a story here, farcical as it is. Probably the first reader-participation novel written(you gotta play chess). Hints of what was to come, but mostly in retrospect. Murphy is a fun read, it's almost a shame it was written by the author of Waiting for Godot, Molloy, Endgame, Stories & Texts for Nothing, footfalls: it doesn't come close to the complexities expressed in those works, probably because it follows Joyce, and tries.

The theory that Beckett personifies is definitely in his first novel, MURPHY, yet his writing skills could not contain the beast later known as Beckettian thought. We do find the most loving, emotional character in all of Beckett in the form of a love struck prostitue, Celia, yet by the close of the text she is as emotionally vacant as the title character. Though the idea of illusion as delusion, which Albee would later cash in upon crops up, in this text, which I found intriguing. Lots of humor still which would taper off shortly after GODOT, starting with ENDGAME. Great black humor. Oh, an aside, have a dictionary handly, a good one, for this text is full of 5-10 dollar words, phrases, and quotes, some of which are quite arachic to say the least.

not only does this book have the best first sentence of any twentieth century book, its subtle and precise sentences illustrate an author in control of his language. whilst it may not appeal to those who find the interminable boredom of Godot somehow profound, it illustrates that Beckett could write structured narrative within a comprehensible plot if he wanted to. beckett's sympathy for his characters whilst at the same time ridiculing their pretensions in his own quiet way is austenian in its subtlety, and as an introduction to the later trilogy it is unmissable.

Samuel Beckett makes me hate my life. As an aspiring wordsmith, there's always the trouble of running out of ground to break. Everything's been done, and there's nothing new. Beckett expertly epitomizes this idea for me, as I find that everything I would like to do has already been done in particular by this scowling Irishman. And I love him all the more for it. His prose is illuminating. Not in the sunshine on the meadows kind of way, but more in the sense of walking through the dark and seeing a small streetlamp which serves less to offer you guidance and light the path before you, and more to remind you in bitter mockery that you are lost and completely alone. Beckett is not for people seeking answers, he cuts his prose for the benefit of those out there who do not mind being lost.

My account of reading 'Murphy,' expurgated, accelerated, improved and reduced, gives the following.

Page one: I grin, marvelling at Beckett's wit and his prehensile command of the English language. I pause, to scan a dictionary for some obscure little term (syzygy, anyone?). I pause again, to scan another dictionary for the same obscure little term. ('You cram these words into mine ears, against the stomach of my sense' -Shak.) I sigh, thoroughly vexed by the absurdities of the 'plot' and my complete reduction to an analphabetic lexicon-dependent cur. And then at last I grin, mollified again by Beckett's wit.... Onward, page two awaits!

Pages two through one-hundred and fifty-eight: same as above.

Hell roast this story, I don't know what to make of it.