Freelance graphic designer Jonny Pelham outlines his process for redesigning three of Beckett’s most important novels – Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable.

I first came across Samuel Beckett’s work as a teenager, designing the stage for our sixth form production of Waiting for Godot.

The set itself was just an old dust sheet spattered with black paint (a lazy and disaffected teen homage to Pollock) that I paired with a feeble tree made of papier maché and chicken wire. My classmates performed the play in the original French and despite my sub-par scenery and awful French comprehension skills, the experience converted me into a lifelong Beckett fan.

Roughly twenty years later, Faber’s art director, Pete Adlington, handed me a design brief for Beckett’s three most important novels – Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable.

As a freelance designer you are rarely involved in the creative direction, cover meetings or strategy discussions that influence a book’s final cover. So this is my sense of the process as a remote practitioner.

Loosely speaking Molloy has characters and two narrative threads that you could plausibly call plots. Malone Dies is similar in some ways, but far more fragmentary and liquid. The Unnamable, however, veers from any kind of novelistic approach altogether and lands us in a consciousnesses hounded by the mechanics of its own mind. This progression suggested dissolution as a jumping off point.

 In the past couple of years I have been exploring Buddhist philosophy and practises and it had occurred to me at some point that the Buddhist model of reality closely resembles Beckett’s, just viewed through a different lens. Some cursory digging revealed that at least two or three books had already been written on this connection. For example, in both there is the conviction that once a ‘self’ is created, suffering necessarily follows. Each see the profusion of phenomena as an expression of voidness, and vice versa. And predictably, anyone trying to put boundless, ineffable truths like these into words – to be understood, and more importantly felt – runs repeatedly into the stumbling block of language. In many ways Beckett’s use of language and the scenarios he creates are similar to Chan or Zen’s deployment of the koan – there is a seemingly absurd or unremarkable encounter, the meaning of it is opaque, or else manifold and tied completely in knots. Whether reading a koan or a passage from Malone Dies, one has a sense of glimpsing The Absolute through a letterbox.

With all this in mind, I first wondered if a Zen-like aesthetic could work for Beckett. Or perhaps an approach where image becomes non-image, drawing attention to its materiality rather than its subject. This route didn’t fly in-house though, and in retrospect I can see why, so as we entered the second round of visuals I was asked to try something ‘jucier’, ‘more explosive’, that proclaims ‘here is BECKETT!’

Some other early iterations were undoubtedly too polite (works featured were by Yayoi Kusama, Edda Renouf and Frank Stella.) It’s worth noting that entropy was still a through-line here, moving from the quasi-systematic Molloy, through the drifting reality-collapse of Malone Dies, to the indefinable formless realm of The Unnamable. This sense of breakdown would carry through to the final designs, albeit in a subtler form. I was also still very attached to the idea of keeping things monochrome but as we moved into the home stretch my job was to add more colour as an appeal to new readers of Beckett. Finally I relented and went full colour, picking out dominant hues from the selected images to apply to the background and type. These ended up being selected with one request – could we have more colour? I started to question the implications of Beckett being more lurid than Dolly Alderton. (Collage on Molloy by Kurt Schwitters, and two drawings by Karl Wiener for Malone Dies and The Unnamable.)

… I can’t go on, I’ll go on.

All that was needed then was brighter author type for Molloy and a little more saturation in the background. We also brought the titles up in size a little for better screen readout.

There’s little more to say except that this was a dream job. Beckett is a huge challenge but his work is also limitless, and I could happily spend the next ten years of my life designing just these three books. If it seems like a bit of a winding road to end up at what is essentially just some type with an image then I think that’s probably quite fitting for Beckett. That’s the nature of design, turn and turn about.

For more about Jonny's work visit https://jpelham.co.uk/