Samuel Beckett, Max Nordau, and the Worms of How It Is

Abstract

“One louse meets another louse,” Beckett jests in a letter to a friend (Letters 3 347). “The first says: ‘Anything wrong?’ The second: ‘I’m feeling man-y’.” Whether lepidopteran, chironomid, or other, worms in Beckett are emblematic of indeterminacy, of being less-than-fully human. Nowhere is this clearer than in How It Is (Comment C’est), a text populated by creatures whose condition is very literally touched by Beckett’s preoccupation with the “eternally larval” (Letters 2 103). In his “Pim” notebook, Beckett twice jotted down “être un ver quelle force” (“to be a worm, what strength”), a phrase lifted from Victor Hugo’s L’Homme qui Rit (Comment 200). Among possible titles for the novel, Beckett toyed with using “Cher fruit cher [ver]”—a phrase of Blakean feel that made it into the body of the text as “Dear bud dear worm” (How 69). In the published version, however, the most explicit intimation of Bom’s worm-like existence is provided by the image of a self-dividing slime-worm. Bom likens the movement between torturers and victims to the “migration of slime-worms ... or [a] tailed latrinal scissiparous frenzy” (How 98). The French gives “vers de vase” (Comment 144)—a type of insect belonging to the order chironomidae, whose larvae are often found in sewage (see Armitage et al. 132). Like caterpillars, slime-worms eventually transform into a winged insect; unlike butterflies, however, the winged insect is habitually parasitized. Within a context where the suffering of one creature sustains another, such metamorphosis seems apt. But there is no suggestion that this change occurs, thus implying a failure of becoming. Beckett may have encountered “scissiparous” in Georges Bataille’s Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism and the Taboo (1957), where the word is used in its scientific sense to indicate the splitting of a single organism into two: “Let us call the original cell a, the two cells it turns into aa and aaa” (95). In Beckett’s novel, such bifurcation is dramatized on a small-scale https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.1937474