How It Is

How It Is

"How It Is" is a novel by Samuel Beckett published in 1964. It consists of a monologue by the narrator as he crawls through apparently endless mud, and reminisces on his life. The mud appears to be a kind of purgatory.

The title is Beckett's translation of the original French, "Comment c'est", a pun on "commencer" or 'to begin'.

The theme may be the struggle of form to emerge from formlessness using Leopardi's sense of the world as mud ('E fango è il mondo'), as well as Dante's image of souls gulping mud in the Stygian marsh of the "Inferno" (Canto VII, 109-126, in Palma's translation):

:"Set in the slime, they say: 'We were sullen, with":"no pleasure in the sweet, sun-gladdened air,":"carrying in our souls the fumes of sloth.":"Now we are sullen in this black ooze' - where":"they hymn this in their throats with a gurgling sound":"because they cannot form the words down there." [ Dante Alighieri, "Inferno", translated by Michael Palma, W. W. Norton & Company, 2002, p. 77]

Dante's Belacqua and his foetal position also are referenced in "How It Is" and the following quotation may serve to illustrate the work's unpunctuated, dense and poetic style:

:"the knees drawn up the back bent in a hoop the tiny head near the knees curled round the sack Belacqua fallen over on his side" :"tired of waiting forgotten of the hearts where grace abides asleep" [Samuel Beckett, "How It Is", John Calder Publishers, 1964.]

The text is divided into three parts:

1. "before Pim" - the solitary narrator journeys in the mud-dark until he encounters another creature like himself thereby forming a "couple".

2. "with Pim" - the narrator is motionless in the mud-dark until he is abandoned by Pim.

3. "after Pim" - the narrator returns to his earlier solitude but without motion in the mud-dark.

In a letter (April 6th 1960) to Donald McWhinnie at BBC Radio Drama, Beckett explained his strange text as the product of a " 'man' lying panting in the mud and dark murmuring his 'life' as he hears it obscurely uttered by a voice inside him... The noise of his panting fills his ears and it is only when this abates that he can catch and murmur forth a fragment of what is being stated within... It is in the third part that occurs the so-called voice 'quaqua', its interiorisation and murmuring forth when the panting stops. That is to say the 'I' is from the outset in the third part and the first and second, though stated as heard in the present, already over." [James Knowlson, "Damned to Fame", Bloomsbury, 1996, p. 421.]

Notes and references


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