"The Calmative." What to say? That's a tough one. The story starts with narrator telling us he's dead and proceeds through a surreal description of a bizarre city and its surroundings. The first time through, I thought of H.P. Lovecraft's "The Dream-quest of Unknown Kadath." I read this story all the way through a couple of times and restarted it twice more. It was, finally, on the fourth time through that I made a few connections that helped me find a way to understand what was happening in the story.
First, let's note a few images or themes that are found in the other Beckett short stories so far. The narrator has been kicked out of at least one place, probably several. He remembers his father both fondly and with some ambivalence. His father was a significant presence in his childhood. The narrator has a hat. He seems slightly less insane that a "normal" person in the world outside the text. Near the end of the story, the narrator tries to see the stars to fix his position, but cannot see or find the stars for which he is looking. The narrator senses a group of unseen people watching him. Thus this story and its narrator share several points in common with other stories we've read so far and their narrators.
But, as I said, making sense of this one was hard. In part, this was because the narrator seems more disconnected from present reality than the previous narrators. The text is more wandering and disjointed than previous stories. What finally began to bring it together was the section in the second paragraph when the narrator says he is telling the story in the past tense even though it is happening now. While this could be a construct to beguile the reader into sensing the immediacy of the story, it seems an unlikely device. Using present tense for the story would accomplish this more effectively. Instead, I concluded that the narrator is saying that, what he is describing as if it were past tense is what is currently happening in his mind.
Then I connected that with the "assassins" the narrator fears and from which he is escaping into his refuge (the mental construct of the city and all that happens there). I tied these back to the sentence in the first paragraph where he tells about dreading several things. He talks about "the red lapses of the heart" – pauses in his heartbeat of which he is painfully aware (In a story I once wrote, one character tells another about hearing his heart stop and that he'd never really heard it beating before, and had not been able not to hear it beating since, so this idea resonates for me.) – and "the tearings at the caecal walls" – the feeling of matter moving through his intestines. This implies he is intensely aware of his body, which suggests his external senses or mobility or both are compromised. He also talks about "the slow killings… in my skull," which echoes a line from "The Expelled" where the narrator says, "Memory is killing."
From this, I developed an image of a person who has been immobilized by some physical trauma such as stroke, heart attack or paralysis. This is reinforced by the image of the sky falling upon him and him falling and calling for help (both in the first paragraph). His death is a figurative death. He is living dead, waiting to actually die. Or is this "death" from existential meaninglessness?
With that premise, the confusing opening begins to make more sense (at least to me) and the rest of the story, cataloging his travel through the city and what he saw there, becomes a journal of a wounded man's imagining as he attempts to lose that physical awareness that plagues his waking. In many ways, this makes the story into "The Dream-quest of Unknown Kadath" with a different center of horror. Or maybe not so different. Lovecraft seemed to dwell on the horror of void – of isolation and emptiness, and that is roughly where Beckett seems to go with this story.
So the question becomes, how is this story a "calmative," a tranquilizer, mood stabilizer, anti-anxiety drug? The narrator tells how his father would read him a story (the same story every night) to calm him, and talks about the calming power of stories. They soothe the mind by distracting it from present problems. I think this is where Beckett meant the title to lead. The story is the narrator's attempt to distract himself – to stop thinking about the present horror of his existence.
A couple of other points to note. Near the end of the story, the narrator falls in the midst of a throng. This seems to tie back to "the day I fell" in the first paragraph, suggesting that his story ends with the catastrophic event that left him as he is. He also refers to the light he stepped in that "put out the stars." This seems to tie back to "the sky with all its lights" falling on him in the first paragraph.
In conclusion, I think that, if the narrator actually found this story calming, his daily existence must be horrific. Or, perhaps his life before was so horrible that the narrator finds no relief in recalling it and reliving his youth and must instead make up stories like this to fill the time.
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