SAM I AM.

"We're not beginning to . . . to . . . mean something?" one character asks another in Samuel Beckett's 1958 play "Endgame." It turns out to be a well-warranted concern. Beckett's writings constitute probably the most significant body of work produced by a twentieth-century author, in that they're taken to signify the greatest number of things. "You might call Beckett the ultimate realist," one eminent critic says, while the title of Anthony Cronin's fine 1997 biography calls him "the last modernist," and, equally, thanks to his spiralling self-referentiality, he's often accounted the first postmodernist. Emptying his books of plot, descriptions, scene, and character, Beckett is said to have killed off the novel--or else, by showing how it could thrive on self-sabotage, insured its future. A contemporary playwright suggests that Beckett will remain relevant "as long as people still die." Introducing Beckett's later novels in a new Grove edition of the writer's work issued to mark his centenary this year, Salman Rushdie takes the opposite--or, life being what it is, perhaps the identical--view: "These books, whose ostensible subject is death, are in fact books about life." One of the most purposely obscure writers of the last century has become all things to all people. On my bookshelf I also have a volume that I picked up as a nineteen-year-old trekker in Kathmandu: "Beckett and Zen." Since Beckett got from Schopenhauer what Schopenhauer had found in Buddhism, the connection is not far-fetched. And, come to think of it, a long practice of za-zen might be required before we could so empty our minds as to open up one of Beckett's texts and hear simply the words that are there.

Why does every literary cause want to recruit Beckett? What is the eagerness, among all parties, to claim as their own the author of the following not at all unrepresentative passage from "Molloy," the first book of the famous trilogy on which Beckett's high reputation as a novelist rests? Here--and if it seems a bit long, consider the paragraph of some eighty pages in which it occurs--the ancient, decrepit Molloy reminisces over the creature who first acquainted him with love:

She went by the peaceful name of Ruth, I think, but I can't say for certain. Perhaps the name was Edith. She had a hole between her legs, oh not the bunghole I had always imagined, but a slit, and in this I put, or rather she put, my so-called virile member, not without difficulty, and I toiled and moiled until I discharged or gave up trying or was begged by her to stop. A mug's game in my opinion and tiring on top of that, in the long run. But I lent myself to it with a good enough grace, knowing it was love, for she had told me so. She bent over the couch, because of her rheumatism, and in I went from behind. It was the only position she could bear, because of her lumbago. It seemed all right to me, for I had seen dogs, and I was astonished when she confided that you could go about it differently. I wonder what she meant exactly. Perhaps after all she put me in her rectum. A matter of complete indifference to me, I needn't tell you. But is it true love, in the rectum? That's what bothers me sometimes. Have I never known true love, after all? She too was an eminently flat woman and she moved with short stiff steps, leaning on an ebony stick. Perhaps she too was a man, yet another of them. But in that case surely our testicles would have collided, while we writhed. Perhaps she held hers tight in her hand, on purpose to avoid it.

This is fun to read, but what nasty fun! On the following page, Molloy recalls "the indifference with which I learnt of her death." Granted, it was "an indifference softened indeed by the pain of losing a source of revenue." The Beckett of the novels is not a very efficient writer--exhaustion is his method--but he can probably condense more cackling blasphemies onto a single page than anyone else. The tributes swirling around him this year rightly place his work in the context of debts to Joyce, Proust, and Dante. They tend to overlook the fact that reading Beckett is frequently like watching the Western canon stick its fingers ...