Word: blobbing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Beware of the blob...
...careful of the blob...
This current pop hit perfectly describes the view of man held by a new school of novelistless writers. From Cervantes to Hemingway, storytellers have assumed that man has hopes and aspirations, and that they could be expressed meaningfully. Bosh, says the new school. Man is a blob, creeping and leaping about a world he cannot control, his words meaningless or hypocritical or both. The best thing a novelist can do, the argument runs, is to ditch the novel as it is now known and write a new kind that shows man as the pitiable blob he is. Two new books...
...UNNAMABLE, by Samuel Beckett (179 pp.; Grove; clothbound, $3.50; paperback, $1.45), carries the blob hero to his logical conclusion: "complete disintegration." Mahood, the hero-victim of The Unnamable, who early in the book dubs himself Worm, never leaves a large jar. It stands on a pedestal in a street presumably in Paris, just outside a chophouse. He is without arms and legs, and a collar fastened to the lip of the jar fits under his jaw so that he cannot move his head. The restaurant owner's wife changes the sawdust in the jar now and then, feeds...
...Morgan, the energetic pragmatist. Morgan's wife Rennie is a kindred empty spirit. Says Horner of her: "She had peered deeply into herself and had found nothing." Rennie herself seems to agree. Of her life before she met Joe, she says: "I just dreamed along like a big blob of sleep." Now she regards her Joe as her personal God. After she discovers, in a grotesque episode of peeping tomfoolery, that her husband is not God after all, the novel reaches its nub with the mating of the two nothings-Rennie and Horner...