The Mythic Narrative of Beckett's “The Calmative”

The Mythic Narrative of Beckett's “The Calmative”

After recalling that he does not know when he died, the narrator in Samuel Beckett’s “The Calmative” says that he needs to tell himself a story in order to calm down. While he could tell a modern story, the narrator insists that he has to tell his story “in the past… as though it were a myth, or an old fable” (Beckett, 28). Though the narrator’s mental state does not seem to resolve to one of calmness by the end of the story, his choice to utilize a mythic form of storytelling suggests that he may find this kind of narrative potentially more calming than depictions of modern life.

In order to discuss the use of myth in “The Calmative” we must first make a distinction between the popular use of the term myth, which designates something as being untrue, and the more traditional use of myth as a narrative form. Though there are many, and often conflicting, characteristics of what makes a story mythic, the myth-theorist Mircea Eliade gives a generally accepted definition of the term: myths are narratives that a particular culture believes to be true, which often use the adventures of supernatural beings to explain the foundation of and make sense of that culture’s reality (Eliade, 5-6).
While Beckett’s narrator is not necessarily telling a cultural story dealing with supernatural beings, it is important to note that nor is he telling a deliberate falsehood. The narrator’s myth draws on certain forms and themes that can be found in cultural mythologies, which he points to within the text of “The Calmative.” The story must take place in the past, the narrator needs “another age, that age to become another age in which I became what I was” (Beckett, 28). This somewhat circular passage seems to suggest Eliade’s definition of a foundational story; the narrator’s story takes him back to the time in which his reality was made. If we take this reality to be the narrator’s present state of death, then we might expect his myth to recount the events or adventures leading to his demise.

Beyond this somewhat “autobiographical” function of myth, or of stories set in the past tense, Beckett’s narrator also points to certain narrative forms that are common to mythology, which he attempts to use within his calming story. The narrator remarks that his story has to be like the one his father used to read him, the adventures of a boy named Joe Breem, or Breen, who swam for miles through the night “out of sheer heroism” (Beckett, 30). It is suggested that the narrator must go on a similar heroic adventure, one including the plot elements of “the setting forth, the struggle and perhaps the return” (Beckett, 30). This structure of the heroic journey is common to mythic narratives, and has perhaps been made most recognizable by Joseph Campbell, who discusses it in similar terms of the departure, the initiation, and the return (Campbell, ix). The narrator even recognizes the literary tradition of using this mythic motif when he recalls the woods at the mouth of hell, an allusion to, and perhaps a suggestion that he is inhabiting, the journey of Dante’s “Inferno.”

The other mythic form that Beckett’s narrator attempts to calm himself with is that of a fall and redemption, a theme commonly found in Christian mythology. Early in the story the narrator mentions that he fell, called for help, and it came, perhaps within the series of events leading to his death. This is echoed near the end of the story when the narrator actually does fall. For a moment he is “sated with dark and calm” (Beckett, 45), and with the redemptive courtesy of not being touched by the throng that he thinks surrounds him, before this is swept away and he continues on his journey. While the structure of this mythic form is less clearly articulated within the text than that of the hero’s journey, a number of references to the mythology of Christ are sprinkled through the story. From the “Shepherd’s Gate” and “bats like flying crucifixions” to the “colours of the Virgin” in the butcher’s window (Beckett, 31, 44), it seems that the narrator is striving to find a similar mythic calmative as that found by Christ: a redemptive death.

Having established the devices by which the narrator of “The Calmative” hopes to tell his story, we can now turn to the question of how this mythic form of storytelling may be capable of calming him. Beckett returns to the story of Joe Breem, or Breen in the first text from his later collection, “Texts for Nothing,” where it is further elaborated that this story “began unhappily and it ended happily, every evening, a comedy” (Beckett, 79). Drawing on the elements of comedic drama, in which the narrative resolves positively for its protagonists, this suggests that the story told by the narrator of “The Calmative” might have a calming effect because it too can resolve. Looking at the mythic narrative forms discussed above we see that these each have that possibility of reaching a positive ending; a fall can be redeemed, a journey can be returned from, a story told as if in the past can ideally reach the present. The narrator hopes that by telling a mythic story he can reach the calm of a definitive ending.

Another calming element of this mythic form of storytelling is suggested in “The Calmative” by looking at what specifically in his father’s story calms the narrator. It is not enough that his father tell him the story, but it has to be read “evening after evening” (Beckett, 30), without missing a single word or picture. What is calming in this story is its repetition, its familiarity. In “Texts for Nothing” the narrator says that he is “all ears for the old stories” (Beckett, 78); what makes his father’s story familiar, and consequently his own, is that they can draw on the repetition of familiar elements throughout the history of literature and myth. It is calming for the narrator to cast himself in the role of Dante or Christ because he knows these stories, and in them he can hope to find a similar ending for his own. The pictures in the story of Joe Breem, or Breen were already pictures of the narrator. By identifying with these “supernatural,” or at least heroic, literary beings from his cultural tradition, it appears that Beckett’s narrator may indeed be telling a myth in the full scope of Eliade’s definition. Telling his story as if it was a myth allows the narrator the calming effect of existing within an established cultural narrative.

But, having chosen to tell his story in this particular form, what makes a mythic narrative more calming for the narrator than a story set in modern times? What makes him long “for the tender nonesuch” (Beckett, 41), and for the shade of his wood far from the terrible light of the city? Though the narrator attempts to tell his story as if it were in another age, he admits that what he tells “this evening is passing this evening, at this passing hour” (Beckett, 28). He lives in the modern present, where “houses and factories darken the air, trams go by, and under your feet wet from the grass there are suddenly cobbles” (Beckett, 28). If a story set in the past is calming because it can hope to reach towards and explain the present, the present must be anxiety provoking because it can only continue moving forward without allowing the narrator to rest in a specific point in time. With the “scarcity of passers-by” and the “extraordinary light shed by the streetlamps” (Beckett, 38), the narrator is left to ask everyone he encounters what time it is, as if being able to fix himself in a specific moment will calm him. But when he finally is told a time it leaves him just as anxious as before. Even his father’s greatcoat, which would fix his story in the 1900s, has become a sleeveless cloak, perhaps indistinguishable from those worn throughout the ages.

The anxiety causing and alienating effects of modernity echo throughout “The Calmative.” The trams and busses run “as if underwater” (Beckett, 31), the houses and factories, even the people lurking behind their windows are described as if in a dream. Like in his fruitless quest to determine what time it is, the narrator describes these elements of modern life as being unrecognizable, unfamiliar and thus unsettling. Mythic narratives can be calming by presenting a repetition of familiar scenes and characters, but a modern story can only present the nameless goatherd and salesman, people sunk into themselves and all moving in the same direction. Even more unsettling is the narrator’s inability to locate the Shepherd’s Gate and constellation of the Bears. Without these recognizable, mythic elements, the narrator is unable to find his way out of the modern city into the calm of a familiar story. Though the narrator attempts to place himself in the woods of the chronicler d’Aubigné, or the posture of the poet Walther, no element of a modern story can replicate the familiarity of a literary tradition. It is only with the passage of time that stories become culturally accepted, and so the narrator is left to wander through a story that even he is not yet sure how it will end.

The strongest blow to the possibility of a calming modern story is its inability to achieve the structure of myth (though perhaps this also signals the narrator’s inability to tell his story as if it were a myth). The story does not have a recognizable beginning, instead of setting forth the narrator suddenly finds himself in a wood in which “no trace remained” (Beckett, 28) of his previous passage. Nor is there a struggle or initiation. The narrator says, “this evening something has to happen… as in myth and metamorphosis” (Beckett, 29-30), but despite his attempted interactions with the other characters no real heroic action takes place that might calm him. Even when the salesman grabs him the narrator claims that nothing has changed, and he wanders on looking for his moment of redemption.

As for a narrative return, the story “ends” with the narrator still wandering lost through the city. This lack of resolve can be taken as symptomatic of modern stories, because the present still continues to move forward without foreseeable end. In contrast to the contained form of the myth, Beckett presents us with what might be considered a definition of a modern story: the salesman’s story of a life that is “brief and dense, facts, without comment” (Beckett, 40). Though the narrator finds this story almost fairy-like in places the salesman corrects his mistake by explaining that he left his lover Pauline, who will only grow old and die. We do not find here the happy ending of a comedy, such as that ascribed to the story of Joe Breem, or Breen. There is no typical comedic ending of a wedding; there is no rebirth, no happily-ever-after. In this modern story of a life there is only divorce and then death.

Of course, for the narrator of “The Calmative,” a happy ending might be one that ends in his being able to die. But this kind of ending may only be possible in a story told through the traditionally familiar, positively resolving, and foundational elements of mythic narratives. The calming effect that the narrator seeks is otherwise unattainable in the anxiety-ridden and never-ending stories of modern life.


Works Cited

Beckett, Samuel. “The Calmative” and “Texts for Nothing.” Stories and Texts for Nothing. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1967
Campbell, Joseph. “The Hero with a Thousand Faces.” 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968
Eliade, Mircea. “Myth and Reality.” New York: Harper & Row, 1963