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Beckett’s How It Is: A Novel of Dying Flashes
(Reflections on Samuel Beckett’s novel How It Is)

By

Adil Mukhtar

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Born in 1990, Adil Mukhtar grew up in Pakistan, majored in
English Literature from University of the Punjab in 2019 and
later taught at Government Post Graduate College Pattoki. He
is an acknowledged modern marsiya writer in Pakistan. His
first book Risa e Asr, a collection of six modern marsiyas, was
published in 2019 by Izhar Sons Urdu bazar Lahore and it
received a huge admiration in Urdu world of marsiya.
Shards to Observe was the first collection of his English poems.
Adil has been a constant reader and critic of Beckett’s works
since his academic studies. How It Is: A Novel of Dying Flashes
is considered as one of his fine collections of reflections on
Beckett’s novels.

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Samuel Beckett’s (1906-1989) works show a spiral progress, a
continuous tightening curve, one just to reach the central point
(the essence). According to Beckett an artistic creation is
essentially like a process of excavation or comparable to an
attempt to reach an ideal, impossibly infinitesimal as to reach
the core of an onion.
Beckett’s novels, in his whole career, have been the act of
peeling the layers of the notions about the self and the world,
peeling the traditional fashions of thought to discover the very
essence of existence free of the bounds of diverting effects of
intellect, logical structure, and analytic order.
There’s no finality or intellectual conclusiveness.
Beckett aggravates the refusal to interpret his own works
philosophically by claiming not to understand the philosophers.
The interview granted in 1961 to Gabriel D'Aubarède of Les
Nouvelles Littéraires, he engaged in a spirited piece of dialogue
with his interviewer. On being asked, ‘Have contemporary
philosophers had any influence to your thoughts?' He replied,
‘I never read philosophers.' Asked again, ‘Why not?' He plainly
answered, ‘I never understand anything they write.' But Gabriel
insisted, ‘All the same, people have wondered if the
existentialists' problem of being may afford a key to your
works.' Beckett rejected such assumptions and said, ‘There is
no key or problem. I wouldn't have any reason to write my
novels if I could have expressed their subject in philosophical
terms.'
- Taken from Samuel Beckett, The Critical Heritage, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979

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In Beckett and Philosophy Dermot Moran has also mentioned
that Beckett once wrote, ‘I am not a philosopher. One can only
speak of what is in front of him, and that is simply a mess.’

Beckett’s works do not give congenial space to criticism or to

a single, agreeable, philosophical interpretation, as he
pronounced critical statements during his interviews and
refused every particular intellectual approach in spite of the
emphasis by the “impressive intellects.”

This is the thing that encourages all sorts of his readers. It

invites every type of mind. Its appeal is to anyone who can, at
least, read the text. It does not leave the job of interpretation
specified or limited to the institutional wits and intellects. And
the most appropriate example at this place is of Rick Cluchey,
the prisoner who became an interpreter and performer of
Beckett’s works.

So there is no key to Beckett works besides the experience

itself.

This is the reason that for How It Is (1964) we have to put the
philosophical speculation aside and we have to feel the
inevitability of the phenomenon like death, which is a recurrent
theme of his works. Death itself is a subject which requires no
key to be known, being an experience that is for all, whether
they are intellectual or not; death is inevitable. We think about
death mostly in the frame of religion, philosophy or some other
spiritual or intellectual aspects but in How It Is the experience
of death is crafted with the hands of animal instincts.
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How It Is is about how our instincts receive the notion of death.
It is ultimately a story but it is a story of a man with a shattered
memory and intellect and he is about to die and that’s the only
thing which he knows, seemingly, very well.
There is a man (Bom) in darkness crawling in the mud
repeating his life within as it is heard outside by another voice.
The noise of his breathing or panting fills his ears so it is the
only eventful thing that happens in the mud and the darkness.
The novel starts as,” voice once without quaqua on all sides
then in me when the panting stops” and in the very beginning
of the novel the theme of the novel is established by the
speaker:
“my life last state last version ill-said ill-heard ill-recaptured ill
murmured in the mud brief moments of the lower face losses
everywhere”

He refers to the voice without as “quaqua on all side” and in

this
sense the whole novel is the extension or representation of this
very ‘quaqua’.

Before going further, it is opportune to pause here and find out

the significance of the word ‘quaqua’ as “qua” is a Latin word
and Beckett has played with this little word in other works too,
especially in Lucky’s speech in Waiting for Godot.

“qua” means “as” and it connects with the title “How It Is” as
the novel is written as the voice without is heard within.

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Beckett knew that the philosophers, theologians and lawyers
love that little Latin word ‘qua’, or ‘as’. So it could be a satire
on the whole logical system of language that we do not, in our
whole life, create words but consume them, repeat them as we
have heard them from the environment.
As the ‘quaqua’ is a joint word or repetition so at one level it
offers a unity among ‘without’ and ‘within’ and on the other
hand it is comprehended as an echo or a noise so its meaning
does not result in a comprehensible system, rather it produces
mess- a mess that is to be ordered, which is the very job of an
artist defined by Beckett.

The environment of How It Is is an entirely metaphorical and

distinctly a surreal one. Without reference to a familiar world,
this novel like most of his works, is governed by an interior
system of recurrent images and memories as mentioned in the
above lines at start of the novel and these images and the
environment or setting of the novel are the depiction of
barrenness of the self.

His1981 piece Ill Seen Ill Said also sums up the situation:

“Void. Nothing else. Contemplate that. Not another word.

Home at last. Gently gently. Modern humanity is at home in
its homelessness.”

In the passage “in me that were without when the panting stops
scraps of ancient voice in me not mine”, “scraps of ancient

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voice” indicates that all the utterance that is ahead is just a
fragmentation of ‘the voice without and not a whole. And this
fragmentation cannot be integrated to get a biographical idea
because these scraps are the scattered images of the memory of
a shattered intellect. And these images are not sufficient to draw
a comprehensible picture of the life of the narrator as he himself
quotes:
“recorded none the less it’s preferable somehow somewhere as
it stands as it comes my life my moments not the millionth part
all lost nearly all someone listening another noting or the same”

However, there are some images or flashes that can be

considered to have some biographical touch, though these
flashes are vague but not devoid of the interest of the readers.
For instance, the very first image narrated by the speaker is very
close to the comprehension of a newly born child or if to say
precisely, it recreates the very first experience of a baby coming
out from the darkness of the womb to the light of the
environment.
“life in the light first image some creature or other I watched
him after my fashion from afar”
After this image the speaker narrates another image of a woman
without mentioning she is his mother or babysitter but it is clear
that he has it in his mind as a memorial flash.
“another image so soon again a woman looks up looks at me
the images come at the beginning…
she has only to call me by my name get up come and feel me
but no

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I don’t move her anxiety grows she suddenly leaves the house
and runs to friends”

If we assess the text after removing the repetitive phrases and

clauses, we can get some glimpse of the life of the narrator that
could be important to some extent in the analysis of the mind
behind the utterance, because before all, it is very important to
us to know what are the narrator’s own ideas about his own life.
After the second image the narrator leaves some clues about his
life, which prove that the narrator has been an abandoned soul
in his whole life.

“others knowing nothing of my beginnings save what they

could
glean by hearsay or in public records nothing of my beginnings
in life”

For searching vague biographical details from the flashes the

third image is also an important one and in this image the
speaker mentions his mother:

“next another image … mother’s face I see it from below it’s

like nothing I ever saw”
Though there are number of images or flashes which the
speaker repeats in the mud or in the mind but the problem is
how can these images be integrated to get a whole view of the
life of the narrator when he is confused and this recollection of
the experience is not in his control. So what we and the narrator
himself get are the only unreliable images and flashes to which
he calls as “rags of life.”

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“rags of life in the light I hear and don’t deny don’t believe
don’t say any more”
The narrator even does not have the idea of history. The only
reference of the time he proposes is according to Pim the
second character of the novel, against whom the narrator tends
to define his own status and this is how he discriminates past
and present distinguishing the spans of his life as ‘before Pim’,
‘with Pim’ and ‘after Pim’ and the novel is thus broken into
three parts: before Pim, with Pim, and after Pim, as well.

The Bom and Pim interaction is an agonizing account of misery

in a nowhere of darkness and slime. Though Bom the narrator
is forgetful and has lost most of the record of his life, he can
still remember himself as a tormenter and Pim as a tormented.
This torment, agony and misery become, at least, the reference
for the memorable ruins and it shows that in this life that is
encompassed by x-axis and y-axis, torment, suffering and
misery are inevitable. The details of the torments recalled by
the confused and unreliable narrator are worth noticing and
these details show that the only thing in which the narrator has
mastered is the very act of torment and he considers this span
of his life as “happy in its way”:
“soon unbearable thump on skull long silence vast stretch of
time soon unbearable opener arse”

It is likely here to point out that suffering can be classified as

mental, physical, and social suffering, and then it offers sub-
categories. For example, depression grief, anxiety, and
existential suffering are all types of mental suffering. This is
the very thing that prevails the whole of the novel and can be
an obvious theme of the fiction.

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The atmosphere and themes of the novel are familiar to the
readers of Beckett but the structure seems conveying problems
for the comprehension as the passages or lines lack all the
mechanics of the language(punctuations) and there is scarcity
of grammatical linkages (prepositions, conjunctions, relative
pronoun). But the reason is obvious as it is not the utterance of
an intellectual or the person of a sound memory and wisdom so
such diversion are not devoid of reason and secondly these are
images that are uttered by a speaker who has not lived the life
sophisticatedly. So we cannot hope for a sophisticated language
of narration. A part from that there is also the failure of memory
and remembrance that leads to the failure of conclusiveness.
Beckett has portrayed artistically this failure with the stylistic
feature of the novel. The monologue is made up of false starts,
self-corrections, interruptions and repetition that show that this
is not an ordinary or sophisticated speech of the daily life. It
tries to collect the scraps of a different situation and experience
to craft a quite new meaning.

So the matter itself and the manner, in which the language of

fragments creates its own system of repetitions and alterations
of phrases, are more important than the so called plot. This is
the way by which Beckett has successfully created an order out
of the mess.

The extremely calculated prose creates a sense of

the consistent, but inexplicable and ultimately uninformative,
impingement of the past on the present. This is not the

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narration of an organic plotted life but these passages are the
last flashes of a dying shattered mind. The images he quotes or
quoted to him by “the voice without” are random events that
occurred in the narrator’s life of which he has impressions but
it is not clear that whether he considers these events or the
scraps of past important or not.

When the speaker says, “my life last state last version ill-said
ill-heard ill-recaptured ill murmured in the mud brief moments
of the lower face losses everywhere” it is obvious that the novel
is the last speech or the last fragments of the memory of a
person who lacks the knowledge and order of his life.
How It Is, we can say, is the ‘silent voice’ of a dying person. It
can also be the immediate voice of the dead even after the
happening of his death. How it can be so? That is the question
and it can be answered in the light of a recent research.

On February 23, 2022 an article was published on BBC News

Washington, titled as “Life May Actually Flash Before Your
Eyes on Death-New Study” by Holly Honderich. In this article
it was reported “A team of scientists set out to measure the
brainwaves of an 87-year-old patient who had developed
epilepsy. But during the neurological recording, he suffered a
fatal heart attack – offering an unexpected recording of a dying
brain.
It revealed that in the 30 seconds before and after, the man’s
brainwaves followed the same patterns as dreaming or
recalling memories.”

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And this is what How It Is is about, the fragments of the
distorted memory.
The article moves on and we find, “Brain activity of this sort
could suggest that a final “recall of life” may occur in a
person’s last moments, the team wrote in their study, published
in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience…”
Holly Honderich further stated:

“Dr Ajmal Zemmar, a co-author of the study, said that what the
team, then based in Vancouver, Canada, accidentally got, was
the first-ever recording of a dying brain.
He told the BBC:
“This was actually totally by chance; we did not plan to do this
experiment or record these signals.”

What the doctor next proposes is the most crucial thing as it is

relative to the whole discussion. He concludes, “If I were to
jump to the philosophical realm, I would speculate that if the
brain did a flashback, it would probably like to remind you of
good things, rather than the bad things…But what’s
memorable would be different for every person.”

And here is the narrator of How It Is who is obviously different

and weird to an extent and he is one of the typical characters of
Beckett who lack memory, intellect, order, hope, aim, meaning,
quest, resistance and action. So his memorable material would
be

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different and unique or, as mentioned before, weird
consequently.

If it is the case as mentioned in the research, we can figure out

why the novel is in three parts. The life flashes within 30
seconds before and after the death and this also has been
mentioned by the narrator again and again in the novel. There
is an alarm of the death in the last part where death is too close
to live more than 10 or 15 seconds:
“my life ten seconds fifteen seconds it’s then I have it murmur
it it’s preferable more logical brief movements of the lower face
with murmur in the mud”
If Joyce’s Ulysses records the events of 19 hours of Thursday
16 June 1904, and is full of chat and images, noise and music,
thoughts and actions, in short, full of the details of an urban life
How It Is, on the other hand, is a novel of 10 to 15 seconds that
records the images of the mind of a dying person just before his
death or after death. Here we can see how one ‘Irish wit’ is
totally different from the other one.

The narrator repeats it progressing towards the closure as the

inevitable is close and there is no respite left for him:

“at last who listens to himself and who when he lends his ear to
our murmur does no more than lend it a story of his own
devising ill-inspired ill-told and so ancient so forgotten…”

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It was about 1968, in David Frost’s Televised Program ‘Frost
of Saturday’ Nicol Williamson was invited as a guest along
with Rosalyn Hayward, Rev H. A. Harry Williams to discuss
on the subject of dying and death. On being asked, “You’re
holding a book there and it’s a Beckett book and we’re talking
just now about whose writing summed up death as well as
anybody else, for you in your mind you pick Beckett and you
pick…why is that” Nicol Williamson replied, “Well because I
think that if you sort about death or you think about death you
have to sort of thing the way you feel it to be yourself through
your own animal instinct and to me Beckett does this. I don’t
find it pleasant but I find it honest and I find it direct; I find it
truthful harrowing frightening but I also find it intensely sort of
moving and human…” Frost interrupted and asked to recite
some lines from the book (How It Is). Nicol Williamson opened
the page he had marked and said, “I mean this to me is just
illustrates really the kind of terror that is… runs in one’s mind,
the way that one’s, or the feel of that or the way that I feel about
death itself” and he read aloud the last passages from the novel
and at the end all the audience was in a state of awe.

“and all this business of above yes light yes skies yes a little
blue… the dark no answer trouble the peace no more no answer
the
silence no answer die no answer DIE screams I MAY DIE
screams I SHALL DIE screams good
good good end at last of part three and last that’s how it was
end of quotation after Pim how it is”

Certainly there is a big idea in this work and that is death but
Beckett has not worked on this subject in philosophical domain
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rather he has portrayed the life and its accessories (the meaning
of life, suffering, the nature of memory, hope and
disappointment, human nature, the condition of embodiment,
the experience of being, dying and just living, the human
capacity for thought and action or inaction, the nature of time,
the poverty of language, the failure of art and the failure of the
self) in the instinctive domain. Not the thought but the
experience itself. In How It Is Beckett has tried to create the
experience of death using the way in which human instincts
work and it seems that he has tried or even died a ‘perfect death’
of an ‘imperfect human.’

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