Ill Seen Ill Said (Mal vu mal dit, 1981) by Samuel Beckett (Summary)

 

Ill Seen Ill Said (Mal vu mal dit, 1981)

by Samuel Beckett

(Summary) 

There is an old woman. She is alone. She lives somewhere in a bleak, grey world, neither fully remembered nor entirely present, on the edge of perception. The air is still, the landscape is pale, the sky is dull. She moves slowly, her thoughts hovering between the present and the fading shadows of memory. Her body is frail, her mind often lost in fragments, glimpses of things half-seen, half-understood.

She sits and she looks, and in her looking, the world appears, or perhaps she imagines it into being. Sometimes she sees a shape, a mound, a house, or a hill. Sometimes she hears a sound, a creaking, a shifting, a footstep that might be her own. Yet nothing is clear; all is blurred at the edges, as if the world itself refuses to be fully grasped. She tries to name it, to fix it in words, but the words come wrong, stumble, misrepresent. Mal vu mal dit—ill seen, ill said.

Her thoughts wander to other lives, to other women who may have been like her, or perhaps are echoes of herself. She recalls moments that might be memories or inventions. There is a sense of routine, a rhythm in her day, yet no action truly unfolds. She moves through rooms, through corridors of her mind, past objects she barely remembers owning, past landscapes she cannot quite place. Everything is distant and intimate all at once.

Loneliness surrounds her. It is not only the absence of people but the impossibility of connection, the inability of her mind and body to fully encounter anything. And yet she persists, aware of her own perception, aware that she is seeing poorly, speaking poorly, but still compelled to see, to speak. The world is always just out of reach, and she reaches, fumbling, striving, misnaming, misremembering.

Beckett’s narrative follows her in fragments, jumping from image to reflection, from present observation to blurred memory. There are no plot twists, no dialogue to anchor events—only the persistent motion of consciousness. The reader is drawn into the rhythm of her experience: the flicker of thought, the repetition of gestures, the faint glimmers of the outside world intruding on her solitude.

In the end, there is no grand resolution, no revelation. The woman remains in her place, in her world of partial vision and fractured language. Yet in this incompleteness lies the profound truth of Beckett’s story: that life is always a struggle to see clearly, to express what is barely perceptible, to inhabit the fragile boundary between presence and absence, sense and nonsense. She persists because she must, and in that persistence, the ordinary act of perceiving—however flawed—becomes both a struggle and a form of quiet heroism.

The story closes not with closure but with continuity: the woman still sits, still sees, still speaks poorly of what she sees, and the world continues to exist, in all its half-seen, half-said obscurity.