All is ready. Except me. I am being given, if I may venture the expression, birth to into death, such is my impression. The feet are clear already, of the great cunt of existence. Favourable presentation I trust. My head will be the last to die. Haul in your hands. I can’t. The render rent. My story ended I’ll be living yet. Promising lag. That is the end of me. I shall say I no more.
Surreal, absurd, dismal, brilliant
He is an old man on the brink of death. He is lying on a hospital bed or is he in an asylum or is it a prison cell?
He is waiting for the inevitable.
I fell asleep. But I do not want to sleep. There is no time for sleep in my time-table. I do not want – no, I have no explanations to give. Coma is for the living. The living.
His only possessions: an exercise book, a pencil and his hat.
I say living without knowing what it is. I tried to live without knowing what I was trying. Perhaps I have lived after all, without knowing. I wonder why I speak of all this.
But while he is waiting, why not write stories about characters he has never met, or met and has forgotten or met and wants to forget? He could give them life. He could bestow them joy and pain. He could kill them.
A little darkness, in itself, at the time, is nothing. You think no more about it and you go on. But I know what darkness is, it accumulates, thickens, then suddenly bursts and drowns everything.
He could write in his exercise book. Not about himself, but about what life is and what death could be.
But what matter whether I was born or not, have lived or not, am dead or merely dying, I shall go on doing as I have always done, not knowing what it is I do, nor who I am, nor where I am, nor if I am. Yes, a little creature, I shall try and make a little creature, to hold in my arms, a little creature in my image, no matter what I say. And seeing what a poor thing I have made, or how like myself, I shall eat it. Then be alone a long time, unhappy, not knowing what my prayer should be nor to whom.
Malone Dies, the second book in The Trilogy was written in 1951 originally in the French language.
An excerpt:
"Nuance. What I sought, when I struggled out of my hole, then aloft through the stinging air towards an inaccessible boon, was the rapture of vertigo, the letting go, the fall, the gulf, the relapse to darkness, to nothingness, to earnestness, to home, to him waiting for me always, who needed me and whom I needed, who took me in his arms and told me to stay with him always, who gave me his place and watched over me, who suffered every time I left him, whom I have often made suffer and seldom contented, whom I have never seen. There I am forgetting myself again. My concern is not with me, but with another, far beneath me and whom I try to envy, of whose crass adventures I can now tell at last, I don’t know how. Of myself I could never tell, any more than live or tell of others. How could I have, who never tried? To show myself now, on the point of vanishing, at the same time as the stranger, and by the same grace, that would be no ordinary last straw. Then live, long enough to feel, behind my closed eyes, other eyes close. What an end."