Parallel Evolution

Perhaps I am thinking a bit in evolutionary terms due to recently wrapping up Barrett's Ship Fever, where almost all the main characters are men or women of science, including a handful of doctors from the early days of medicine where so much was still being discovered about the origins of various diseases.  At any rate, I am midway through Beckett's Molloy (the first novel in Three Novels), and I noticed some interesting parallels.  Both are permeated by thoughts of death, but also the characters are flustered and flummoxed when forced by the police to answer questions about their activities.  Furthermore bicycles seem omnipresent in both books.  I had assumed that The Third Policeman was inspired by Beckett, but this isn't the case at all.  The Third Policeman was actually written much earlier (1939-40) but then went unpublished until 1967, after Brian O'Nowlan's death.  Given that Molloy was published in French in 1951 and then translated into English in 1955, it seems that the two were conceived completely independently of each other!  I suppose one might simply say that the Ireland of their formative years was rife (if not to say overrun) with both policemen and bicycles.

It is a bit harder to credit that independently both would mention that the narrators had forgotten their name when asked by the policemen, with only Molloy recovering it later.  And both had trouble with their legs: Molloy having one stiff leg (later two), necessitating crutches, and the unnamed narrator of The Third Policeman has a wooden leg.  Naturally both authors are quite playful with language.

I used to have a running tally of "ten-dollar" words, but I wasn't able to keep it up.  However, I am going to list just a small number of the words that Beckett throws into his novel, most of which don't appear to have direct French translations, so that is a bit odd in itself.  Much to my surprise ratiocination was a "ten-dollar" word that I included in my second post and simply forgot all about it!  It basically means the process of logical reasoning.

Here are a few others that he sprinkles through Molloy (with definitions):

Stultification - to have a dulling or inhibiting effect or to cause to appear or be stupid, foolish, or absurdly illogical.

Otiose - serving no practical purpose or result.

Factitious - artificially created or developed.

Supererogation - the performance of more work than duty requires.

And a twenty-dollar word - floccillate - to pluck at the bedclothes occurring especially in the delirium of a fever.  It is quite hard for me to believe this is an actual word, as it is so absurdly specific.  From the context in Molloy, I thought it meant something more like an aimless flopping of the limb(s).  At any rate, I don't think I can top that, so I'll just stop here before this post descends into "fatuous clamour" which the agent in Molloy warned against.