Thus Malone Dies
Thus Malone Dies
Once there is death, there would be death no more.
And Malone dies.
Malone – whoever this man is – was old enough to come to that action “die”. He dies, he is about to die, or he is dying. He was not dead, he has been on the verge of being dead, just not yet. Not yet. He still lives, in the state of an infinite approximation of death, but probably not quite the “dies”.
Thus, the very statement “Malone Dies” opens up the problem of the mysterious action, primarily as the problem of speaking of “die”. “Die” is a verb, which is, by definition, an action. To die in biological sense is to switch off the button of life and to extinguish all lights. Poof. Period. It clicks within an instant, too immediate to accommodate much human consciousness.
Malone, though, dies, consciously and enduringly. He knew his death awaits him, so promptly that he prepared the time or the breaths he needed to accomplish one last project of his life. That knowledge or foresight transfigures the action of “die”. Malone dies, and to die is to experience certain duration of time and life, during which the die-er is endowed with the one and only chance of maneuvering the one and only death.
To die is much more that to be dead; it turns life back or pushes it to reach its virginity that signifies the mortal fate of living being. It is the process of universal equality in which everyone is assimilated and disfigured. In that process, no more identity is relevant and no individuality would matter, to others.
Only to himself would it matter.
Malone dies, and simultaneously he creates and begets. He turned to fictions, the perfect form for the die-er. Again, because he dies.
To die is to reach the state with the richest experiential material for fiction and the poorest physical condition for non-fictional or practical action. To die disables the limbs and freezes the body so that it frees the spirit to grasp its last moment, the moment to express the deepest desire of life – to live. Fiction transfigures the desire. When living is a mere living-dream, life shrinks and collapses, like a burning-out star, emitting its last and brightest radiance and approximating to its eventual possibility as a black hole, the purest absence of life and light.
On the way to that pureness, only fiction can ferry us mortals.
Malone Dies is Beckett’s novel version of Borges’s “The Secret Miracle”. Malone dies at two past nine, with three times of stories evade from his life.
Then it would be our turn.
