Slow Going.

Birkbeck College, London The stage directions for Beckett's television play Ghost Trio specify that the door leading off the room to a tunnel stage right and the window to stage left should be 'imperceptibly ajar', an instruction that gave the set designer for the first production agonies of scruple.[1] This stage direction might suggest an exquisite variation on the whiskery old gag: 'When can't you tell that a door is not a door? When it's imperceptibly ajar.' What this direction means in fact is that the door will turn out later to have been imperceptibly ajar, when it is able to be opened without turning a knob or releasing a catch. This is the aspect of slowness that interests me most of all in Beckett; the slowness of things happening, as it is put repeatedly in The Lost Ones, 'by insensible degrees'. No other writer has joined his rhythm so unflinchingly to the rhythm and duration of insensible elapse, to the ordinary mystery of what Beckett in his notes on Winnie's forgetfulness calls the 'incomprehensible transport' from one moment to another, the inability either to coincide with the passing of time, or to be able to arrest it.[2] Again and again I will have to keep coming back to this point, in the face of my own attempts to make slowness apprehensible and comprehensible. An academic paper is one of many devices we have for gathering up time and making a narrative artefact of it. Narratives are well equipped to offer a simulacrum of this quality of temporal passage because they not only represent the fact of time passing, they also themselves extend through time in their telling. They take time, as we say. But this will always turn out to have been a ruse, a way of turning aside from the actual conditions of time passing, which remain definitive for any narrative, but unlegislatable by it. What I mean to try to get at, but will be content to have managed merely to get amidst, is the experience of going slowly, of slow going.

Let me attempt to distinguish the two: going slowly and slow going. Going slowly has a good reputation. It can connote care, attentiveness, and a fullness of response, a refusal to be rushed past or deflected from one's purpose. Going slowly is at the heart of that process of delaying, holding back from immediate gratification, which is the foundation of self hood and of culture; the toleration of frustration in the interests of a greater yield of pleasure or value further down the line. Going slowly has traditionally been associated with the possibility of being able to be, as opposed to the modern forms of becoming. This kind of slowness has traditionally meant the examined life; it has meant culture itself. The impulse to slow down, to linger, loiter, or retard, is there throughout Beckett's work: for example in the section of Company that follows the movement of a second hand around a watch face. It is there, too, in those recommendations to pause, or hold back, which are found throughout that text: 'Gently . . . Doucement'. Slow and steady wins the race. Going slowly ought to give us time to keep pace with our lives, ought to allow us to watch our step, to hear the feet however faint they fall. Slowness has the reputation of allowing us to take control over our lives, to take our time.

In the condition I am going to keep on calling slow going, however, there can be no convergence of the one who undergoes and the one who perceives the time of elapsing. There can be no deliberation. We cannot live at the rate at which we nevertheless must live; we cannot live in the time that it will over and over again turn out that we were all along living out. Life, and the pivotal moments of a life, the moments after which nothing was ever the same again, will all in the end be, in the concluding words of Beckett's play That Time, 'come and gone in no time' (CDW,p.395). 'No time' here seems to mean not only 'in the blink of an eye' but also something like my slow going; the immeasurable, unexperienceable drift of accretion and degradation, the insensible process that one cannot live slowly enough to live knowingly, because then one would be getting ahead of oneself, living more quickly than the process which lives itself out in our living. Going slowly is something we attempt to do to time; slow going is what time does to us, through us. 'Whether or not we use it, it goes|And leaves what something hidden from us chose.'[3]

This word going is itself often at the intersection of the two kinds of duration. Going slowly implies a kind of going on: persistence, or progress. Slow going will always turn out to have been a going out. Beckett's work allows, even seems to require, some acknowledgement of this slow going. But it does not see round the question of its own slowness, is not in charge of the meaning of its slowness. It does not thematize its slow going, or when it does, it cannot itself any more be or be undergoing the process of slow going (except of course, and necessarily, unknowingly). Slowly going on, in a way that will be more than a slowing down, but will turn out to have been 'darkward bound',[4] a slow and sure going out. We cannot apply a measure to this movement of slow going, because it is itself the only scale against which to measure the refusals and remissions of elapsing time of which the hectic interval of human life is composed.

The spatial sublime of magnitude has been converted in our era to a temporal sublime of speed. Speed accomplishes the attenuation of mass and extended substance. The rule seems to be, the smaller, the faster. Modernity marvelled at itself in the haughty substance of the Great Eastern; postmodernity sees its image, or rather does not, in the imperceptible, in the nano-engineered processor based on a single molecule. Samuel Beckett participates in this miniaturization; instead of epics and monuments (A la recherche du temps perdu, Finnegans Wake), Beckett scaled down. But miniaturization is not accompanied by lightness and speed in Beckett's work. He is in fact the most important inaugurator of a mode of aesthetic defection from speed. It seems to be precisely the uninterpretability of slowness that has made it so important in the art of that --what is the wrong word exactly? --rearguard, that avant-garde which, finding itself humiliatingly outstripped by a culture in which acceleration has become the dominant value, began to look for ways of turning from speed or promptness, or punctuality; an art that wanted to try to stop being on time; hence musical minimalism, and especially the beautiful excruciation of Steve Reich's phase-experiments, and the rent, discontinuous fabric of the work of John Cage and Morton Feldman, the interest in processes of slow decomposition in the work of Helen Chadwick, Andy Goldsworthy, and Damien Hirst, and the confrontation with slowness of Michael Snow's Wavelength. Slowness is not representable. Representation is an effect of punctuality, or promptness, of the ravelling or puckering of time. Slowness testifies to asynchrony, a failure to meet up, or come together. Speed is inflammatory, infectious. It calls me into its condition, chiding and chivvying, pulling me out of my time into its more than time. It calls me into its synchronicity, holding a promise that I will be able not only to accomplish particular purposes more quickly, but will be able also to be at speed, to be at one with what breaks exultantly with mere being, to be merged with its ecstatic going out from the mere condition of going on. Speed is not merely ecstatic because it throws us out of ourselves; it also offers the prospect of a mode of being in that condition of being beside ourselves. Slow going is always the failure to be there, to have been there, in our own midst, in the condition of slow going that will have been going on, as we so serenely say, all the time.

This is why speed seems to offer itself as a hunger for a kind of terminal velocity: we know that the speed of light is the fastest that anything in our observable universe can go. Slowness is indeterminable, since in order to know the absolute limit of slowness, we would need to know how long the universe is going to last. The terminal rate of slowness would then be that of some singular event which unfolded continuously and occurred only once in the course of that entire history. Slowness is of course relative. Slowness is slow by comparison with the right speed, or relative to expected or desired promptness or despatch; relaxed slowness relative to hurry or pressure to speed up. We mistake the experience of slowness as a simple negative measure; if only things could go more quickly, in the queue, during pain or unhappiness. But slow going is not quite this. It is the experience of a loss of temporal relativity; when things are going slowly, the scale of measurement itself begins to elongate, to attenuate, to dissolve. The extreme sense of measure, the inhuman measuredness of much of Beckett's work, its quality of calculated slowness, is itself perhaps a protest against the erosion of measure that begins when slowness gathers. It is a protest of going slowly against the process of slowly going. For even to explicate slowness is of course to speed it up; to save one the necessity in future of going through it all again, so intolerably slowly. It is to summarize. Two words repeatedly scratch that itch to economy, the desire for summary in Beckett's work: 'so on'. These words answer the need to pucker up the agony of unrelieved elapse into something calculable and roughly predictable: 'So on infinitely until towards the unthinkable end if this notion is maintained . . .' (CSP,p.177).

A brief respite: where are we in this paper? Somewhere near the beginning, to be sure, but already with intimations of what it will be like to be in the middle, and where we are going to be by the end. As I sit typing these words, I am both before and ahead of this moment (this moment being in point of fact 6.25 am on Friday 25 September). Actually it is not; I decided to tell you the time at which I wrote these words a minute or so after I had actually written them. In fact, I can tell you exactly when the thought occurred to me to go back to what I had already written and record the time I had written it, because I made a note of it. It was just after having typed the phrase (wait, I'm just popping to the end of the paragraph to find it again, OK, I'm back) 'what was then envisaged as the first sentences'. These words were first written two minutes later at about 6.27. So, by the time we get to that phrase it will be about 6.27, though in fact as I write these words (these actual words 'these words'), it is already 6.32. So, then, let us finally strike out towards the past that this parenthesis has now strewn in its own path: I asked where are we in this paper? I have a pretty good idea of how I will get to this point and what will succeed it (actually I have stopped the clock several times in order to visit what was then envisaged as the first sentences, and to play around with what I have in mind as its end).

In all of this, I have been substituting temporal ordering for temporal duration. But none of these games of anticipation and recall could come about or have any meaning except by virtue of the fundamental condition, as unseizable as it is inescapable, of elapsing. No matter how my writing limps or sprints, compresses or relaxes, no matter what complex origami I effect on the sequence of its composition, time will have passed, quickly or slowly, quickly and slowly. I cannot get in step with this elapsing for which I am always too fast or slow, and which is neither the time of writing, nor the time of reading. All I can do, and cannot anyway but do, is to disclose it as the geologically mobile ground of all my fidgetings of protention and retention. I wanted, sitting at my desk, to predict what the speed of that passing might be, but I could not. Its condition of taking place is its horizon of possibility, an horizon that, no matter how I struggle to watch myself, to write the time in which my writing (and then, when I gave this paper, my speaking, and then again, as I marked the paper up for the web, and now, again, as I revise that version for print publication, my writing again), to get in step with the time of my speech, I cannot get myself into the field of my vision, any more than Winnie in Happy Days can see her own face. I seem always to be out of step with the time that not only passes, but passes away (passes away from and through me).

Jean-Francois Lyotard reflects on the difficulty of conceiving what he calls a phenomenology of elementary time. Like Beckett, he is interested in trying to grasp what it would be like simply to be, in time, without any attempt to grasp, hold, or reserve the experience for later use or contemplation. The French word maintenant, he says, recalls to us 'how much maintenance there is in the least instant'. Lyotard goes on to suggest that time must be apprehended, which is to say minimally represented, or held in memory, in order to be experienced:

The constitution of the present instant [. . .] already demands a retention, even a minimal one, of various elements together, their 'constitution' precisely. This microscopic synthesis is already necessary for the slightest appearing. For plunging into the pure manifold and letting oneself be carried along by it would allow nothing to appear to consciousness, nor to disappear from it for that matter, appearing not even taking 'place'. This place is due to a synthesis, that of apprehension, which as it were hems the edges of the pure flow and makes discontinuous the pure continuum of the flow while making continue the pure discontinuity of its supposed elements. In short the river needs a bank if it is to flow. An immobile observatory to make the movement apparent.[5]

One could reverse that final judgement: Lyotard says we need to pinch time to perceive its passage. We need to put our hand into the current, to feel its onward pressure from the resulting turbulence. There needs to be something nontemporal inserted into the flow of time for temporality to come into being. But we might as well say that the hand recognizes that it is stationary only because there is passage, because of the difficulty of holding its position against the current. We can only ever stop time because of its passage. The static observatory does not create the passage; the passage creates the possibility of the observatory that can never be in the right place at the right time. I spent some considerable time in a book I wrote a long time ago reflecting on the ways in which Beckett gathered, folded over, and resynthesized time, especially in the Trilogy.[6] I was tempted then to see atemporal repetition as a triumph over the tyrannical fantasy of present time or linear passage. The book and the precipitate person who wrote it were both in the grip of a Bergsonian attitude towards time, which had perhaps transmitted itself through the work of that most loyal of Bergsonians, Gilles Deleuze. Bergsonian was my desire to track and preserve the building continuities and the unarrestable accumulations and recurrences of time in Beckett's work. When no time is wholly distinct from any other time, there is, to be sure, no static presence, but time nevertheless seems to form an ideal plenitude. I am committing myself now to apprehend the force in Beckett's work of what could be called a dissociative rather than an accretive duration, of the tense we could call the present discontinuous; the ordinary, fundamental, terrifying topple of time's slow foot into the next moment, the disfazione (unfolding, unworking, working out, falling out, dissolution, decomposition) of sheer elapse that never resolves into anything as dramatic and determinate as collapse or relapse, the pitiless passing away, in soft and imperceptible torrent, that passes understanding.

When Lyotard says, commenting on his evocation of the synthesizing apprehension of time, 'you see that we have got into phenomenology', he is reminding us of the ways in which phenomenology has helped to explicate the ecstatic nature of temporality, the way in which the comportment to a future and the relation to a past tugs at the instantaneous present, thus both dividing being from itself and giving it its emergent unity in division. 'I project myself toward the Future in order to merge there with what I lack; that is, with that which, if synthetically added to my Present would make me be what I am', writes Sartre.[7] Living in time thus draws us both out of and into ourselves. We are all, and all of the time, in and out of time, our inability to be thoroughly in time our way of being in it. Such ecstatic projections of being into becoming, however, depend upon speed, by which I mean upon variations in speed; to be ahead of yourself is to go faster than you are in fact going. Even to slow things down is really to live faster than one is living: since, to slow down, to apply the brakes on living, one must get ahead of oneself, take the measure of one's headlong plunge into futurity, in order to rein it in and hold it back.

Speed and slowness have new possibilities and poignancies in a world of storable and reproducible time, such as film and music, which allow us simultaneously to preserve stretches of time (we may never know the tempo of Mozart's symphonies, but we know exactly the speed at which Billie Whitelaw performed Not I, alas) and to manipulate these recorded stretches, speeding them up and slowing them down. In fact, recording is a kind of master-mechanism for Beckett's work in prose and drama after the Trilogy. For recording allows a certain kind of play between actual and possible speeds and durations. Recording allows one both to reproduce and to change the speed of a playback. It suggests the possibility of going both faster and more slowly: Krapp winding through to the place he wants in his tapes and, once there, lingering on it in fond longing. This possibility is enacted in what Krapp does with the word that embodies this possibility, the word 'spool'. There is no better picturing in Beckett's work of the regular process of at once going on and going out than the spool of tape unreeling itself at the end of Krapp's Last Tape. As the tape is played, it is transferred from the left hand spool to the right. The more one has gathered on the right, the less remains on the left. Going on can only be accomplished by going out, winding on by reeling off. After all the complex envelopings and pocketings of times within times, all the topological loopings together of past and present in Krapp's Last Tape, the play tries to expose us to the pure elapsing of moments. The unspooling tape is Beckett's answer to the retentive, accretive rhythm of the fort/da. In these moments of unspooling, we seem to be brought into the immediate experience of something going on, of a time both losing momentum, and gathering it as it runs out.

Of course, this is not in reality pure exposure to elapsing. It is a painful interval of slowness that interrupts the continuum of ordinary time, delays the return to non-theatrical time that will come at the end of the performance. It is at once the collapse of representation (nothing is here being represented except what is in actual fact happening, the slow reeling away of the seconds) and a kind of staging of time, which is to say the introduction of a complication, or turbulence into slow going. A pinch of time is taken up between finger and thumb, though we recognize that time has not merely been taken, but also taken up, in this experience of being exposed to the pure elapsing of time, only after it has finished.

One of the most striking responses in Beckett's work to this apprehension of elapse is in the attempt to control and determine its own speed, the aim being partly to resist the corrosive effects of pure passage, to shape duration into rhythm, and partly to ensure that the work had a chance of staying as close as possible to a pure and unmediated process of taking place. The issue that preoccupied Beckett most of all in his direction was not characterization, or setting, or even tone, but speed of delivery. The director has an opportunity to synchronize the time of the work with the time of its performance that is not available to the writer of prose, or the writer of drama whose works are primarily read rather than seen.

The literalizing of temporal ecstasis has become the norm for us, in a world in which the dream of a permanent now is carried by the collapsing together of live transmission and recording, and the maintenance of the maintenant through technologies that ensure nothing slips out of date and everything is for ever. Our capacity to inhabit a permanent, undecaying instantaneousness is the mark of the otherworldliness of our world. Beckett's convoluted temporalities, in which nothing is ever over and done with, everything can recur or be revived, and in which past, present, and future are looped inextricably together, anticipate and mirror the refusal of narrative typical of this world. Narrative is always phenomenologically conditioned by the fact that it occupies and is exposed to 'real time', and therefore must always cope with the danger of interruptedness, with the possibility, which it can never fully legislate, that reading can be broken off, or broken into by other concerns (boredom, hunger, sexual desire, death). To cope with the contemporary culture of interruptions, narrative has generated its own interruptive syntax, taking the condition of its exposure to temporal contingency and making it a necessary part of its being. Thus hypertext, while seeming to surrender itself to the discontinuities introduced into the reading by the choices of the reader, in fact weaves interruptedness into its own fabric, turning chance into choice, and making accident its own.

Beckett's prose fiction anticipates our contemporary world of staged or hyper-represented time; a world in which duration, the condition of living on, of lasting, has been turned into a problem of temporal ordering. The world of hypertext is a world of generalized time-shift; of plastic, reversible, reconfigurable time. If hypertext, anticipated as it is by the temporal convolutions of writers such as Proust, Joyce, and Beckett himself, is an attempt to find in discontinuity a higher, more stable form of continuity, then the opening of Beckett's work out of this continuity into the condition of slow going represents a breaking open of discontinuity itself; not the breaking of the familiar continuity of time by the familiar kinds of modernist and postmodernist discontinuity and temporal paradox, but the rupture of discontinuity by the principle of continuous elapsing.

Beckett's prose fiction attempts at once to score or to stage time, and to expose itself to this disarticulating continuity of elapse. In Beckett's work, these temporal agonistics centre upon punctuation. There are, we may say, four epochs of punctuation in that work. There is the classical or traditional epoch, in which all the resources of punctuation are used. This extends from Dream of Fair to Middling Women to Murphy. With Watt comes Beckett's discovery of the extraordinary capacities of the comma, to create a kind of counterpoint between the sheer going on of the sentence, with no awareness of its likely end, and the interruptions, resumptions, and folding over that the comma gives. It is in The Unnamable and the Texts for Nothing that the capacities of the comma, to breach and bridge, to arrest and propel, are taken to the limit. It is the comma above all that is the vehicle of Beckett's attempt to encounter and inhabit the condition of elementary duration, and to synchronize itself with its own (not ever really its own, that is going to be the point) time of taking place:

Ah, says I, punctually, if only I could say. There's a way out there, there's a way out somewhere, then all would be said, it would be the first step on the long travellable road, destination tomb, to be trod without a word, tramp tramp, little heavy irrevocable steps, down the long tunnels at first, then under the mortal skies, through the days and nights, faster and faster, no, slower and slower, for obvious reasons, and at the same time faster and faster, for other obvious reasons, or the same, obvious in a different way, or in the same way, but at a different moment of time, a moment earlier, a moment later, or at the same moment, there is no such thing, there would be no such thing, I recapitulate, impossible. (CSP,p.101)

Walking and telling are always closely connected in Beckett's work, and this passage tells a brief story of a story told through the taking of steps. If only, the narrator says, there could be a first step, a first word, in the direction of a destination, then the whole thing, the whole journey, the whole story, would become destined, available to be travelled and told. The narrator would like there to be a way out of time through the storying of time, through the projection of a perspective according to which the first of a sequence of steps could be visible as, and known in advance to be, the first. If a particular punctual moment could be seen in this way, it might be possible to match the time of the telling to the time of the passage told of. Indeed the passage that unbuds from this apprehension magically begins to deliver the very sense of measure or metre that the narrator requires; 'faster and faster, no, slower and slower, for obvious reasons, and at the same time faster and faster, for other obvious reasons, or the same, obvious in a different way, or in the same way'. Beckett seems to have drawn the time told and the time of the telling into simultaneity; but the telling is always out of step with what it tells. When the narrative pulls itself up with that first 'no' ('faster and faster, no, slower and slower'), is it because it has got ahead of itself, or because it is lagging behind itself? Something pulls the narrative back, requiring it to acknowledge that what seems like acceleration is in fact deceleration, and then that both of them are effects of perspective. The reader is invited to move at the same pace as the words, measuring slowness and speed against each other. The same moment can be experienced as both slow and fast, because it is always possible to view the moment from the perspective of before and after (with so many steps already taken, each new step will seem painfully slow; with so few left to take, it will seem sickeningly fast). What allows the weaving of this rhythmic ecstasy is a necessary averting from the elementary elapsing which is always, like the tortoise in the fable, too slow either to be outstripped or caught up with. 'The same moment, there is no such thing, there would be no such thing, I recapitulate, impossible.' In the tiny gap between the alternative readings 'I recapitulate that it is impossible' and 'it is impossible for me to recapitulate' lies all the force of time's negligible, ineluctable passage, for which narrative will always have been too quick and too slow. The narrative prefers to show us this non-coincidence rather than to tell us of it, but cannot show it except by its very inability to show it, by its disclosure of the time that will slowly have built, or wasted, as the narrative is taking place. No matter how Beckett's elementary narratives attempt to live in and live out the tense of the present discontinuous, that time can never be got into the narrative.

The epoch of the comma is followed, most notably in How It Is and the 'cylinder pieces' and short residua of the 1960s and 1970s, by a suppression of all punctuation but the full stop (not even this is available in How It Is), accompanied progressively by the withering away of predicative forms. It may seem as though the attempt here is to deliver us to a static manifold, in which before and after are arbitrary and interchangeable. Instead of telling a story, Lessness, for example, simply alternates the ideas that some narrative movement might remain in prospect ('In the sand no hold one step more in the endlessness he will make it') and that the very possibility of change, or there ever having been change has been abolished: 'Never but this changelessness dream the passing hour. Never was but grey air timeless no sound figment the passing light' (CSP,p.155). In the title of the French version of the work, Sans, the condition presented in the text is named as an elementary privation, an atemporal condition of being without. In the English title, Lessness, by contrast, there is a much stronger tincture of temporality, in the hint of progressive passing away or reduction, the process of getting less or what Worstward Ho will call 'leastening'. For, even if we imagine Lessness (the only text in which Beckett consciously employed chance procedures in the composition process) as an entirely unwilled and mechanical process which simply plays through its permutations, the text must always in fact be being read as not for human eyes, by human eyes, within a horizon of unfolding or elapsing time. The reading of Lessness will always require a certain ordeal, the labour of subduing human time to the inhuman time of its verbal permutations.

The feeling that many have of an opening out or flowering in Beckett's late prose, the so-called second trilogy formed by Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho, in particular, is due very largely to the resuscitation of syntax, and especially of the verb, and the consequent relief at the possibility of knitting together the gaps which yawn and claw in earlier work: 'And now here, what now here, one enormous second, as in Paradise, and the mind slow, slow, nearly stopped . . . The words too, slow, slow, the subject dies before it comes to the verb' (CSP,p.76).

The question of punctuation is in a sense itself thematized in The Lost Ones, Beckett's definitive evocation of the condition of slow going. What is it that is most inhuman about The Lost Ones? Surely it is the absence of any events. What we are given is a process in the frequentative mode. Nothing that we see, or hear reported of life in the cylinder is actually happening, or has definitely happened on a particular occasion. Everything has happened in just the same way, and will continue to happen in just the same way as it is now surmised to be happening. There are no absolute, unique, or once and for all events. Everything, it appears, can be undone, or qualified. What counts is only the slow going -- slow going on, slow going out -- of the cylinder and the report that could be given of it, seen in the long run. At the same time, narrative strains to come into being, strains to congeal into punctual moments, the unequivocal first and last moments in a putative sequence. We know that there must be such moments in any sequence. There must be a first tiny tremor in the earth that produces the earthquake, a first uncountermanded malignity from which the fatal carcinoma blooms. These events are absolutely punctual, epochal, marking an absolute break from what has come before, and a microscopic initiation of an enormous and irrevocable change. But they can never be known in themselves, they have no here and now, since their meaning is inundated by what they portend or, in the case of last events, begin to conclude. They are events that will have been the first and will have been the last, seen from the perspective that both belongs and does not belong to them. The narrative is held together by the tension between the merely stochastic nature of the phenomena, and our desire for there to have been a definable beginning and end: was it that time, or was it another time?

The Lost Ones is the most explicitly scientific work of a writer who we know (from a notebook kept in the early 1930s, and now in the University of Reading Beckett Archive) familiarized himself in early life with certain developments in contemporary physics. It is a work which painfully brings together the unrepresentable dimension of entropic decay, the process whereby, in a closed thermodynamic system, the random differences of speed and location which make the energy of the molecules available for work, will inevitably tend to equalize, leaving the system inert and functionless. In one kind of model, the universe is no more than such a closed thermodynamic system. Not only is it bound to end in time, the fact of time only has meaning in terms of the slow approach to the condition of heat death. As is well known, James Clerk Maxwell posited a universe consisting of two chambers, connected only by a trapdoor. He imagined a being or demon who, merely by operating the trapdoor to separate positively charged particles from negative, would preserve infinitely the capacity of the system to generate electrical potential, and therefore work. Human beings have cast themselves in the role of that demon; as the alien element in the system that makes it possible negentropically to turn the current of time upstream. Humanity is a clot or valve in the expiration of time. The demon presence in The Lost Ones is the narrating voice, or even, since as usual we are in a hurry here, narrative itself, which is at once the unconscious and unjudging witness of the phenomena of the cylinder, and the agency which, by positing purpose, movement, and outcome in the cylinder, seems to hold back the movement of time towards the ending of time, seems to bend pure succession into a swirl of persistence, a kind of rhythm or temporal shape other than that of coming apart. It is narrative itself which constitutes what Ilya Prigogine has called a 'dissipative structure' in the otherwise chaotic succession of events.

In one crucial episode, the narrating consciousness postulates the idea of a way out of the cylinder. The second law of thermodynamics applies only to closed thermodynamic systems. If a new source of energy could be introduced into the system, or the system revealed as a sub-system of some larger system, the inexorable progress towards decay could be halted. If there could exist a way out of the cylinder, then there would be the possibility of some new source of life and variation in it, something to hold together its slow unravelling.

From time immemorial rumour has it or better still the rumour is abroad that there exists a way out. Those who no longer believe so are not immune from believing so again in accordance with the notion requiring as long as it holds that here all should die but in so gradual and to put it plainly so fluctuant a manner as to escape the notice even of a visitor. Regarding the nature of this way out and of its location two opinions divide without opposing all those still loyal to that old belief. One school swears by a secret passage branching from one of the tunnels and leading in the words of the poet to nature's sanctuaries. The other dreams of a trapdoor hidden in the hub of the ceiling giving access to a flue at the end of which the sun and other stars would still be shining. Conversion is frequent either way and such a one who at a given moment would hear of nothing but the tunnel may well a moment later hear of nothing but the trapdoor and a moment later still give himself the lie again. The fact remains none the less that of the two persuasions the former is declining in favour of the latter but in a manner so desultory and slow and of course with so little effect on the comportment of either sect that to perceive it one must be in the secret of the gods. (CSP,p.162)

The narrative both forces and forbids itself to see to the end of life in the cylinder, speculating obstinately about the progressive unfolding of events while reminding itself constantly that ideas about the ending of things in the cylinder are notions and hypotheses rather than fact or even reliable inference. The slowness of the cylinder's going and the cleaving of the act of narrative witness to its elementary phenomena are so absolute as to disallow any precipitate hurrying to a conclusion: until, that is, the final paragraph, which Beckett added some years after having abandoned the text as apparently unfinishable. This paragraph suddenly projects us far into the future of the cylinder, to the point where everything may be about to come to rest, after one last encounter between a searcher and the object of his enquiry, the eyes of a long-since vanquished and immobile woman:

There he opens then his eyes this last of all if a man and some time later threads his way to the first among the vanquished so often taken for a guide. On his knees he parts the heavy hair and raises the unresisting head. Once devoured the face thus laid bare the eyes at a touch of the thumbs open without demur. In those calm wastes he lets his wander till they are the first to close and the head relinquished falls back into its place. He himself after a pause impossible to time finds at last his place and pose whereupon dark descends and at the same instant the temperature comes to rest not far from freezing point. (CSP,p.178)

This is the only determinate event in the whole of The Lost Ones. Something has at last happened that cannot, it appears, be reversed or undone by subsequent events; but that thing that has at last happened is the last thing of all to happen, ever. It is the moment at which narrative begins, the moment at which the possible becomes actual. It is brought into being by an act of violent grace, the sudden acceleration away from the sheer condition of imperceptible slow going in the cylinder. The reality of the cylinder, its slow going, remains unrepresentable, except by abandoning the attempt to represent it. Like the story of a human life, the end of the story of the cylinder will always have to have been either too early or too late. The only time that counts will be beyond its power to tell.

The story goes that, watching technicians testing the image quality of Quad, the most hectic and raucous piece that he ever wrote, for reception by monochrome receivers, and running the tape through in slow motion, Beckett suddenly exclaimed: 'My God, it's a hundred thousand years later!' Seeing the hectic bustle of the performance he had already recorded transformed into this laboured shuffle, suggested to Beckett a fast-forward to a time when everything will have nearly run down. As a result, he wrote Quad II, a slow, dim coda to Quad. The thing that has always surprised me about this story is Beckett's surprise at his own discovery. How could he not have realized that the stuttering hurry of the choreographic system he had set up in Quad would have exactly the same outcome as in the cylinder of The Lost Ones? How could he not have anticipated from the beginning the idea of a slow decay of the system he had set up, just as in Play, for which he suggests an exact repeat in performance, only slower and more diminished in energy? One answer might be simply that, amid all the complex repetitions, the loopings together of beginning and end that makes of Beckett's work a kind of dynamic entirety, there is a dimension of unknowingness, of being merely amidst the process of going on, that cannot finally be retarded or accelerated. There are knowledge, memory, struggle, and resistance, not to mention the miniature convulsions of time caused by laughter; but there is no accumulation of these goods in the midst of the unpausing going on and going out.

The Lost Ones may perhaps be taken as a proleptic summary of the whole of Beckett's work, considered as a system closed upon itself, and therefore inexorably, but by insensible degrees, proceeding towards exhaustion and saturation. If the entire effect of that work is to act as a kind of interval, a turbulent suspension in the senseless and insensible unspooling of things in general, it also acknowledges that unfolding, that unrepresentable background from which turbulence derives its energy, and which it may be, in the end, its larger end to have assisted.

Narrative has sometimes found in our era a vocation to synchronize itself with the time that it can neither command nor countermand, a vocation which has a particular sharpness when we have devised so many ways of turning the irreversibility of time's passage into story-time. It is in their dealings with slow going that Beckett's writing and other arts and artists of the dilatory get closest to coinciding with the time their stories take. And what have we been about here, rereading and replaying that work so obsessively? Passing the time, which would have passed anyway.

[1] Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber, 1986), p. 408. References hereafter are given to CDW in the text.

[2] This phrase occurs in Beckett's notes for a production of the play in 1971, quoted in Happy Days: Samuel Beckett's Production Notebook, ed. by James Knowlson (London: Faber, 1985), p. 150.

[3] Philip Larkin, 'Dockery and Son', The Whitsun Weddings (London: Faber, 1977), p. 38.

[4] Samuel Beckett, The Lost Ones, Collected Shorter Prose 1945-1980 (London: Calder, 1984), p. 163. References hereafter are given to CSP in the text.

[5] Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Inhuman: Conversations on Time, trans. by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), p. 159.

[6] Steven Connor, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988).

[7] Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology, trans. by Hazel E. Barnes (London: Methuen, 1958), p. 127.