{"id":2148,"date":"2023-04-13T15:59:54","date_gmt":"2023-04-13T14:59:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/beckett\/?page_id=2148"},"modified":"2024-03-19T13:23:25","modified_gmt":"2024-03-19T13:23:25","slug":"simon-okotie-reflections","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/beckett\/simon-okotie\/simon-okotie-reflections\/","title":{"rendered":"Simon Okotie"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Search of The Lost Ones\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/h1>\n

By\u00a0Simon Okotie<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong>(Creative Fellow, 2022-2023)<\/em><\/h3>\n

I first started searching for The Lost Ones<\/em> on 30 March 1999 in Oaxaca\u2019s English language lending library. This was the second year in a row I\u2019d overwintered in Mexico \u2013 in part to avoid the darkness of that season in the UK, and partly to receive a solar boost in pursuit of completing my first novel, which I hoped to submit to a new literary prize set up by actress and author Marsha Hunt to encourage novels from black British or Irish writers, such books being a scarce commodity in those pre-Zadie days.<\/p>\n

The previous winter (which was also mostly spent writing, reading, and learning Spanish at Oaxaca\u2019s Instituto de Comunicaci\u00f3n y Cultura) I had read Richard Ellmann\u2019s unsurpassable biography of James Joyce and it was this that no doubt led me to pack Knowlson\u2019s Damned to Fame<\/em> as well as the Faber edition of Beckett\u2019s Complete Dramatic Works<\/em> for the subsequent trip. These I devoured, writing out numerous verbatim passages from the former and annotating the latter in my lonely room in San Felipe del Agua in the hills above the town.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know what it was that piqued my interest, in particular, in Beckett\u2019s underappreciated story The Lost Ones<\/em>. A few days before I first read it I\u2019d met an Englishman and his half-Peruvian daughter in La Casa del Mezcal, a dive bar with a wild west feel on Flores Mag\u00f3n, and he\u2019d said to me that he\u2019d left the UK when he was only slightly younger than me and that he\u2019d been lost. He asked me if I was lost and I told him I didn\u2019t think so, yet my search for something \u2013 or someone<\/em> \u2013 continued, a subsequent conversation with father and daughter somehow taking me, the following year, to another lonely dwelling place, this time in the foothills of the Andes in Chile, where my immersion in Beckett continued.<\/p>\n

It may, in fact, have simply been the scarcity of works by, or about, Beckett in that small lending library in Oaxaca (with Deidre Bair\u2019s biography being the only other one I can remember) that led me to The Lost Ones<\/em>: I\u2019d found something, in other words, that I\u2019d not actually been looking for at the time. Whatever the cause, that first reading was indelible, the work\u2019s large flattened cylinder inhabited by two hundred souls staying with me as I travelled.<\/p>\n

In retrospect one of the things that interests me is the transitional nature of this text \u2013 situated, as it is, between the post-war prose, with what S. E. Gontarkski called its \u2018compulsion to (and so solace in) motion\u2019, and the late tales of enclosure \u2018featuring stillness or some barely perceptible movement, at times just the breathing of a body or the trembling of a hand.\u2019 The shift from journeying to a shelter or haven \u2013 often referred to as \u2018home\u2019 \u2013 to the later \u2018closed space\u2019 stories is announced in All Strange Away<\/em> (1963-64) and its \u2018sibling\u2019, Imagination Dead Imagine<\/em> (1965): \u201cOut the door and down the road in the old hat and coat like after the war, no not that again.\u2019 It was with these texts that I decided to start my search, my first visit to the archive (in September 2022) involving looking at every draft of Imagination Morte Imaginez<\/em>\/Imagination Dead Imagine<\/em>, thrilled to view copies of these handwritten manuscript pages with their doodles and mathematical workings out. It was in this way that I would edge myself, for whatever reason and with whatever outcome, towards The Lost Ones<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\n

In Search of <\/em>The Lost Ones \u2013 Part 2: The Model<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

In my first conversation with him about the Creative Fellowship, Prof. Conor Carville, one of the Centre\u2019s co-directors, told me that the archive contained a model of a production of a stage version of The Lost Ones<\/em>; in a subsequent meeting with Conor and the other co-director, Prof. Steven Mathews on the South Bank in London, I told them that an online reviewer<\/a> had built a Lego model of my Two Degrees of Freedom<\/em>, a short prose piece I\u2019d written during the Covid lockdowns and which was published by Nicholas Royle\u2019s Nightjar Press as a signed limited edition chapbook:<\/p>\n

‘Now despite being a mathematician I am not blessed with great spatial-visualisation skills, and I must admit to resorting to Lego blocks to build the shape, but having done so, I can [\u2026] confirm the precision of Okotie’s descriptions.’ Paul Fulcher<\/p>\n

I also told them I had been reading Marco Bernini\u2019s recent book Beckett and the Cognitive Method \u2013 Minds, Models, and Exploratory Narratives<\/em>. Bernini\u2019s thesis is that Beckett inaugurated a process of ‘introspection by simulation’ through ‘fictional cognitive modelling’ \u2013 constructing narrative models to explore otherwise inaccessible aspects of mind \u2013 a model, for Bernini, being \u2018a selective, abstract, hypothetical simplification of reality\u2019 with a strong explanatory or exploratory potential.<\/p>\n

It was perhaps unsurprising, then, that my eyes lit up, on my second visit to Reading as a Creative Fellow, on hearing Dr Matthew McFrederick, Co-Director of the Beckett International Foundation (the research centre\u2019s sister organisation) highlight \u2018the agency models have [\u2026in] support[ing] speculation, experimentation, trying and failing\u2019. This was in relation to another set model held in the archive \u2013 a maquette designed by Peter Snow for the original London premiere of Waiting for Godot<\/em> at the Arts Theatre in 1955, a performance that \u2018represents one of the major transformative moments in post-war British theatre\u2019. Rather than reflecting Beckett\u2019s clear and simple stage directions \u2013 \u2018A country road. A tree. Evening\u2019 \u2013 the model, which is \u2018a fusion of the indoors and the outdoors\u2019, reflects the more typical English theatre settings of the time \u2013 for the plays, say, of Terrence Rattigan or Noel Coward. The model was donated to the archive by the UK\u2019s first female professor of theatre, Katherine Worth, whose accompanying notes indicate that Beckett, on visiting Snow\u2019s studio to inspect the model, showed an \u2018interest in the room concept, though not for Godot\u2019. This is intriguing, as Matt indicates, given that Beckett\u2019s next play was Endgame, whose bare interior, with its two small \u2018high up\u2019 windows, was memorably likened to \u2018the inside of an immense skull\u2019 (by Hugh Kenner). (The archive also contains a model designed by Tom Piper<\/a> for the 2016 production of Endgame at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow.)<\/p>\n

The talk was given in November 2022 during the centre\u2019s 50th<\/sup> anniversary celebrations \u00a0(delayed by a year due to the pandemic) in the Minghella Studios on campus. After the talk and subsequent discussions with Conor and Matt, my attempt to locate The Lost Ones<\/em> within the archive became even more pressing.<\/p>\n

\n

In Search of the Lost Ones – Part 3: On His Last Legs<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Out of the door and down the road in the old hat and coat like after the war, no, not that again. Five foot square, six high, no way in, none out, try for him there.<\/em><\/p>\n

One of the things I didn\u2019t mention to Conor and Steven during that initial meeting on the South Bank (for fear of putting them off) was how excited I was by the possibility of travelling more or less directly from London\u2019s east end, where I live, to the Beckett archive in Reading on the newly opened Elizabeth line (formerly known as Crossrail). This was a project I worked on, as a transport consultant, having returned from my travels in Latin America, a period that encompassed that first indelible reading of The Lost Ones<\/em> in Oaxaca\u2019s English language lending library as well as a final trip, to Chile, where I read the Molloy<\/em>, Malone Dies<\/em> and The Unnamable<\/em>, and Christopher Rick\u2019s Beckett\u2019s Dying Words<\/em>, a work of criticism.<\/p>\n

The link between language and locomotion in Beckett\u2019s work is reflected in characters who are \u2018often completely or progressively reduced to a degree of immobility that parallels the impoverishment of their narrative control\u2019 (according to Bernini). This \u2018mutual deterioration\u2019 is perhaps best reflected in Molloy, the wearer of that old post-war hat and coat, who, in the course of the first half of the novel, transitions from the \u2018erect motion, that of a man\u2019 (albeit one assisted , on occasion, by bicycle or crutch), to \u2018crawling on his belly, like a reptile\u2019, before ending up literally and metaphorically in a ditch, his narrative deteriorating accordingly.<\/p>\n

The hat and coat might also fit another post-war Beckett character, who, having disembarked a train, proceeds in the following manner:<\/p>\n

[His] way of advancing due east [\u2026] was to turn his bust as far as possible towards the north and at the same time to fling out his right leg as far as possible towards the south, and then to turn his bust as far as possible towards the south and at the same time to fling out his left leg as far as possible towards the north\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

I read Watt<\/em> while seconded to Crossrail, but had forgotten about this surprising perambulatory method, and am grateful to Conor for putting me onto this recreation of it by Bruce Nauman: his ‘Slow Angle Walk’<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Watt is in pursuit of Knott, and there is, perhaps, a nod to the negation (really, then, a double negation) of that post-war approach in Beckett\u2019s \u2018no, not that again.\u2019 Instead we have the abrupt commencement of enclosure featuring \u2018some barely perceptible movement\u2019 often entailing \u2018the perception of a figure in various postures, like an exercise in human origami\u2019, according to Gontarski. This enclosure \u2013 along with its encompassing possibility of companionship, however bleak, however remote \u2013 continues, in different forms, from All Strange Away<\/em>\u2019s cuboid quoted above, which is \u2018tightened\u2019 to three foot square, five high, around a solitary male figure, its ceiling then further lowered \u2018down two foot\u2019 to form, now, momentarily, a \u2018perfect cube\u2019, before becoming the rotunda \u2018as in the Pantheon of Rome or certain beehive tombs\u2019 that is taken forward into Imagination Dead Imagine <\/em>and which there contains \u2018two white bodies\u2019, a male and a female, lying on the ground, both on their right sides, \u2018back to back head to arse\u2019, \u2018each in its own semicircle\u2019, through to the one who is \u2018perhaps not alone\u2019 within Ping<\/em>\u2019s \u2018[w]hite walls one yard by two white ceiling one square yard never seen\u2019 (the focus of my second visit to the archive, on 2 December 2022), to the flattened sixteen-metre-high cylindrical abode \u2018where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one.\u2019<\/p>\n

The trajectory is also reflected in Enough<\/em>, another short prose piece from this period. While not a \u2018closed space\u2019 story, it is nevertheless a continuation of the evolution (or, rather, degeneration) of the form.<\/p>\n

In the beginning he always spoke walking. So it seems to me now. Then sometimes walking and sometimes still. In the end still only. And the voice getting fainter all the time.<\/p>\n

Here the figures are (probably) male and female, the former much older than the latter \u2013 a father figure, nearly blind; they tramp the hills hand-in-hand learning the constellations, their posture at rest, seemingly outside, that of being \u2018[w]edged together bent in three. Second right angle at the knees. I on the inside.\u2019 (My take is that this touches upon Beckett\u2019s relationship with James Joyce, who he fell out with (\u2018my disgrace\u2019) over Joyce\u2019s daughter Lucia: \u2018One day he told me to leave him. It\u2019s the verb he used. He must have been on his last legs.\u2019 No doubt others have written about this association, although I\u2019ve not yet found any reference to it.)<\/p>\n

\n

In Search of\u00a0 <\/em>The Lost Ones <\/strong>\u2013 Part 4: In which, yes, I finally found The Lost Ones<\/strong> <\/em><\/p>\n

what would I do what I did yesterday and the day before<\/em><\/p>\n

peering out of my deadlight looking for another<\/em><\/p>\n

wandering like me eddying far from all the living<\/em><\/p>\n

in a convulsive space<\/em><\/p>\n

among the voices voiceless<\/em><\/p>\n

that throng my hiddenness<\/em><\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t make the connection at the time, just over a year after I first read The Lost Ones<\/em>, but the final destination on my travels in Latin America was a place that resembled, in some respects, the enclosed space of the story. The port city of Valpara\u00edso in Chile is built around a circular bay on dozens of hillsides overlooking the Pacific, with a \u2018New World\u2019 grid of public and commercial buildings at its lower level and a labyrinth of residential streets and cobblestone alleyways in its upper levels. Connecting the two are precipitous and dilapidated ascensores<\/em>, or funiculars, of various heights and capacities.<\/p>\n

The upper and lower sections of the sixteen metre high and nearly sixteen metre wide cylinder containing the lost ones is linked by a series of ladders that \u2018vary greatly in size\u2019, the shortest measuring \u2018not less than six metres\u2019, the longest enabling \u2018the tallest climbers [to] touch the ceiling with their fingertips\u2019. The ladders, whose rungs are intermittently and unpredictably absent, are used to convey \u2018the searchers\u2019 \u2013 each of the cylinder\u2019s two hundred lost bodies still searching for its lost one \u2013 to the niches or alcoves, some of which are connected by tunnels, that are located in the upper reaches.<\/p>\n

I was reading Beckett\u2019s Selected Poems<\/em> as I drifted around the grid, listlessly descending and ascending the ascensores, his what would I do without this world <\/em>(above) perfectly capturing the atmosphere of both spaces and my mood at the time. What was becoming clear was that I\u2019d not found whatever or whoever it was I\u2019d been looking for when I\u2019d embarked on the journey more than two years previously.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

When I emailed in January to request access to the model of The Lost Ones<\/em> I received a reply to the effect (not unreasonably) that they didn\u2019t know what I was looking for. I replied that I thought what I was seeking was located in the reading room rather than the archive and that I would try and find it when I arrived. It turned out to be hiding in plain sight opposite the entrance to the open access bookshelves that I\u2019d so delighted in on my first visit.<\/p>\n

\n

In Search of\u00a0 <\/em>The Lost Ones <\/strong>\u2013 Final Part \"\"<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

There is, potentially, a research project here \u2013 exploring, for example, where the set came from (with the correspondence between Beckett and Warrilow held in the archive undoubtedly providing some clues, as would Iris Smith Fischer’s wonderful book Mabou Mines – Making Avant-Garde Theater in the 1970s<\/em>). The main way in which I am putting these materials to use, though, is in writing a piece of fiction inspired by my year-long engagement with the research centre and archive, a piece about someone changing seats, at the start of a performance of The Lost Ones<\/em>, in a space resembling that used in the New York production. I am very much looking forward to reading from this new work of fiction at an event with Claire-Louise Bennett<\/a> at the Calder Bookshop in London next month.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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Despite writing about one in the footnotes of my last novel, the first time I entered an actual archive was on 21 April last year when Guy Baxter, the university’s archivist, kindly showed me the Beckett Collection, the world’s largest collection of materials related to the Nobel Prize-winning author. We talked at length in the open access bookshelves before entering the archive proper: about the fact that the model of The Lost Ones<\/em> I had requested access to was actually part of a stage set rather than being a maquette or set model; that it is not in the published Beckett Collection catalogue (which, in any case, focuses on the manuscripts), being somewhat uncategorisable; that there is an online version<\/a> of the Mabou Mines theatre production using this set filmed at New York’s Theater for the New City in 1975, which featured the celebrated Beckett actor, David Warrilow, as well as music composed and performed by Philip Glass; and about the ephemeral nature of these archival residues \u2013 the grainy film of a theatre production of a stage version of Beckett’s extraordinary novella, as well as the fragile cardboard-constructed set itself.<\/p>\n