Passport Essay - Molloy by Samuel Beckett

A highly-stylized and idiosyncratic novel, set in no definite historical or geographical context, Samuel Beckett's Molloy is open to a wide variety of interpretations. Given that its first half is narrated by a tramp named Molloy who feels overpowering urges to visit his mother, and its second by a mysterious agent named Moran whose method of raising his son is almost draconian, the novel would seem ripe for psychoanalysis. Indeed, in his study Beckett and the Myth of Psychoanalysis, Phil Baker writes that "Oedipalized satire on patricarchy is clearly present in Moran’s half of Molloy and its ‘disintegrations of the father,'" whereas Molloy's section reveals "a failure to get free of the mother and her fatal pull." The text would seem to appeal to queer theory as well. Moran's narrative could be read as an escape from a heteronormative social order - over the course of a journey with his son, his son leaves him and he abandons his role as a widowed father - while the character of Molloy - who lives on the edges of society and appears more sexually interested in his bicycle than women - seems to meet every definition of Lee Edelman's concept of the sinthomosexual, the necessarily marginalized figure who forgoes a meaningful social role for the sake of access to jouissance.

However, a post-structuralist reading of the work might be the most productive approach. While such a reading would not delve into the characters' complicated social and familial relationships, it would discern how this book works as a whole - which would be to discern how this book does not work as a whole. As narrative theorist Brian Richardson notes, "the work is so constructed as to defy any one reading; the evidence is simply inadequate." Whether Molloy is the transformed Moran, or whether the two narratives are two different perspectives on the same events, or whether the two halves of the book are related at all in their plots, is impossible to say. Furthermore, both Molloy and Moran assert that they are, for various reasons, unable to tell their own stories, that their accounts are either partly or entirely fictionalized. Beckett actively contests the linguistic represenation. One needs to recognize that the novel questions a novel's ability to have any stable meaning at all before moving onto the psychoanalytic or queer interpretations of the relationships between its characters.

Annotated bibiliography

Baker, Phil. Beckett and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997.
This book performs psychoanalytic readings of works from every stage of Beckett's career.

Beckett, Samuel. "Molloy." Three Novels. New York: Grove Press, 1955.
Beckett's three novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, explore the paradoxes inherent to narrative.

Edelman, Lee. No Future. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.
Lee Edelman's polemic examines the ways canonical works of literature and film, as well as political advertisements and texts, use an idealized image of the innocent child to propagate a heternormative social order.

Richardson, Brian. Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative. London: Associate University Press, 1997.
Richardson's book examines common features in modern and post-modern narrative, with references to Beckett's Molloy.