Beckett - Boulter, Jonathan PDF

BECKETT: A GUIDE
FOR THE PERPLEXED

THE GUIDES FOR THE PERPLEXED SERIES
Continuum’s Guides for the Perplexed are clear, concise and accessible
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Related titles include:

Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed Claire Colebrook
Derrida: A Guide for the Perplexed Julian Wolfreys
Existentialism: A Guide for the Perplexed Steven Earnshaw
Literary Theory: A Guide for the Perplexed Mary Klages
Tolstoy: A Guide for the Perplexed Jeff Love
BECKETT: A GUIDE
FOR THE PERPLEXED
JONATHAN BOULTER
Continuum International Publishing Group
The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704
11 York Road New York
London SE1 7NX NY 10038
© Jonathan Boulter 2008
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced

or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval
system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
Jonathan Boulter has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-0-8264-9267-8 (hardback)

978-0-8264-8195-5 (paperback)
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Man disappears. This is an affirmation.
—Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments viii
1. Introduction 1
Part I: Drama
2. Waiting for Godot and Endgame 27
3. Krapp’s Last Tape, Happy Days, Play, Not I 52
Part II: Prose

4. Murphy and Watt 81
5. Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable 108
6. Texts for Nothing, The Second Trilogy 130
7. Conclusion 154
Notes 162
Bibliography 170
Index 179
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This is dedicated to Mitra Foroutan and Margaret Boulter.
I also thank my students who have endured my enthusiasm for Beckett

over the years, particularly those in my senior Beckett seminars at
Saint Francis Xavier University and The University of Western Ontario.
I gratefully acknowledge Faber and Faber Ltd for permitting quota-

tion from Samuel Beckett’s work.
The following material is used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.:

‘Not I’ Copyright © 1963 by Samuel Beckett, ‘Play’ Copyright © 1973
by Samuel Beckett, ‘Waiting for Godot’ Copyright © 1954 by Grove
Press, Inc. Copyright Renewed © 1982 by Samuel Beckett, ‘Krapp’s
Last Tape’ Copyright © 1957 by Samuel Beckett. Copyright © 1958,
1959, 1960 by Grove Press, Inc. and ‘Happy Days Copyright © 1961
by Grove Press, Inc.
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
We need a dreamworld in order to discover the features of the real

world we think we inhabit.
—Paul Feyerabend, Against Method
BACKGROUND AND INFLUENCE

Samuel Beckett (1906–89) is one of the most important and influ-
ential writers of the twentieth century. Born into a middle-class
Protestant family in Dublin, Beckett studied Modern Languages
(French and Italian) at Trinity College, earning a B.A. in 1927. In
1928, after a short and unsuccessful stint as a teacher at Campbell
College, Belfast, Beckett became lecteur at the Ecole Normale
Superieure in Paris replacing Thomas MacGreevy, the person respon-
sible for introducing Beckett to James Joyce. Beckett was massively
influenced by his fellow Irishman’s writing and in fact published an
essay on Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (‘Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce’)
in 1929, the same year that he published his first short story ‘Assump-
tion’. In 1934, while living in London, Beckett published More Pricks
than Kicks, a collection of short stories and in 1936 he completed
his novel Murphy (which was published in 1938). In 1937, Beckett
moved to Paris and made France his permanent home until his death
in 1989.
Beckett’s early works, including the novel Watt (published in 1953),
the last novel to be written in English before Beckett turned to writ-
ing in French in 1946, failed to attract much critical attention.1 It was
while Beckett was writing his first novel trilogy, which includes
Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), and The Unnamable (1953), that
Beckett produced his most famous work and indeed the play that was
1
BECKETT: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED
to transform twentieth-century drama, Waiting for Godot (composed

1948–49). Beckett said that this play was essentially written as a
diversion, a ‘relaxation, to get away from the awful prose I was writ-
ing at the time’.2 The two-act play, featuring the now iconic tramps
waiting for this Godot who never will appear, was revolutionary and
contributed in no small part to his being awarded the Nobel Prize for
literature in 1969.
Waiting for Godot, a play in which ‘nothing happens, twice’,3 as
Vivian Mercier famously put it, radically questions the grounds of its
own genre. That is to say, Beckett presents a drama that overturns
audiences’ basic assumptions. There is no character development, no
plot of any consequence, no clear progression of any narrative con-
tent or action: it is a play staging the anticipation of action rather
than action itself. Initially, the play baffled audiences; when first per-
formed in the United States (having been billed as the ‘laugh hit of
two continents’4) people flocked out in droves. Eventually, however,
it became clear that Beckett’s work, if not traditionally dramatic, did
speak to what was perceived to be a recognizable condition in the
1950s: anxiety. In some senses, and this is true for all of Beckett’s
work, not simply Godot, Beckett is interested in analyzing the human
being at moments of intense self-awareness and anxiety (and what is
anxiety if not a condition of extreme self-consciousness?). Godot
spoke to a generation that recognized itself as anxious for meaning,
for significance.
And although it is perhaps too easy to historicize Beckett’s work for
interpretive comfort, we should notice that his major work (including
the first trilogy and the drama of the 1950s and 1960s) was produced
in a context of great shock and protracted anxiety: the Second World
war had recently ended, the truth of the death camps had begun to
be fully known, and the growing conflict between the West and the
Soviet Union served as a constant reminder of the threat of total
nuclear annihilation. Indeed, Beckett’s Endgame (1957), which takes
place seemingly after some great catastrophe (the world has been
‘corpsed’, to use Clov’s horrific word) speaks directly, as the great
critic Theodor Adorno argues, to a post-Holocaust world.5 For all its
difficulty Beckett’s work thus does speak to its time, does present, if
read carefully, a diagnosis of the twentieth century; read from another
perspective the work becomes symptomatic of the twentieth century.
That is to say, Beckett’s work could only have been written in a cen-
tury that witnessed such massive scenes of destruction and brutality.
2
INTRODUCTION
Beckett produced Waiting for Godot while creating his most impor-
tant and influential body of prose work: the first trilogy of novels,
Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. If Waiting for Godot revo-
lutionized drama, this prose trilogy did the same to the novel. Indeed
we may argue, as does A. Alvarez, that in these works Beckett essen-
tially ‘assassinates’ the novel form.6 If Waiting for Godot removed the
drama from drama, these novels removed all comfortable signposts
from narrative: coherent plot, stable character, events occurring in
identifiable space and time. It is clear that Beckett is not primarily
interested in telling ‘stories’ in any conventional sense here; indeed,
one cannot even really suggest a novel like The Unnamable—which is
narrated by shifting, perhaps bodiless, personalities in what may be
some kind of afterlife—has a story at all. In later works like How It
Is (1961), All Strange Away (1963–64), Imagination Dead Imagine
(1965), and the second trilogy (which includes Company [1980],
Ill Seen Ill Said [1981], and Worstward Ho [1983]), Beckett offers texts
which seem to dismantle the generic markers between prose and
poetry to the point where it becomes clear that his main concern is
simply (but what a word!) language itself and the way human experi-
ence is bound up in the linguistic. My interest in this Guide will be to
suggest that this obsession with language, in the way we know and
are known by the world via languages themselves perhaps ineffective
and failing, is the through-line connecting Beckett’s work, both in
prose and drama. In this sense, and I will return to this point in detail,
Beckett’s career is an elaborate and nuanced commentary on a state-
ment by philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer: ‘Language is not just
one of man’s possessions in the world; rather, on it depends the fact
that man has a world at all’ (Truth and Method: 443).
Beckett’s work revolutionized twentieth-century literature. Certainly,
to write a conventional play would prove rather more difficult after
Waiting for Godot, Endgame, or the later more stylistically avant-garde
work. Dramas like Happy Days (1961), which sees a character buried
to her waist (later to her neck) in the earth; or Play (1963), in which
three characters interned in urns are forced, unaware of the others’
presence, to speak about the nature of their tortured relationship; or
Not I (1972), in which a disembodied mouth frantically spews out
a narrative of assault and madness; or Breath (1969), a 35-second
play featuring a stage filled with rubbish and the sound of a cry at
birth and death, all challenge notions of what constitute ‘drama’ as
such. Playwrights like Harold Pinter (who acknowledges Beckett
3
as his master), Edward Albee, and Sarah Kane, are all massively
influenced by the plays: their experiments with form and staging
are all responses to Beckett’s elaborate and relentless critique of dra-
matic convention. And equally, we need to recognize the influence of
Beckett’s prose on twentieth-century fiction. Beckett’s first trilogy, as
well as his later prose, has had enormous influence on writers who in
their turn have become important in the progression of twentieth-
and twenty-first-century prose. Paul Auster (whose New York Trilogy
can be read as a direct postmodern rewriting of Beckett’s first trilogy),
J. M. Coetzee (who in fact wrote his PhD dissertation on Beckett’s
Watt), and John Banville (who in works like The Book of Evidence
shares Beckett’s fascination with the workings of the possibly deranged
mind) all claim an artistic inheritance from Beckett’s singular vision:
their representations of the inner self—psychotic, traumatized—can
be traced to Beckett’s interest in the solitary and marginal figure,
reduced in possessions and body, negotiating a path through a hostile
or indifferent world.
BECKETT’S STYLE
It is precisely this quality of singularity that readers key into when
encountering Beckett’s work: there is simply nothing remotely like
Beckett in the world of literature. While Beckett’s early work (Murphy,
More Pricks than Kicks, the posthumously published Dream of Fair
to Middling Women7) bears traces of Joyce’s influence (as seen in
what is, for Beckett, unusually energetic even playful, prose), his later
work—the turn to which I locate in 1953’s Watt (written between
1941 and 1945)—is uniquely Beckett’s. While it is perhaps unfair to
summarize and distill the qualities of a writer’s work, we can make a
few general comments here. Beckett’s work always, even as its most
extreme limit of uncanniness and strangeness, is relentlessly humor-
ous, if darkly so. At moments of extreme despair on stage a character
will offer a line that will make us laugh, uneasily. In Waiting for
Godot, for instance, Vladimir and Estragon witness Pozzo’s brutal
treatment of Lucky; they then have this brief exchange:
Vladimir: That passed the time.

Estragon: It would have passed in any case.
Vladimir: Yes, but not so rapidly. (40)
4
INTRODUCTION
At moments of extreme pain in the novels a character will deflate his

despair with irony. Malone, alone and dying in his bed, for instance,
offers this: ‘My body is what is called, unadvisedly perhaps, impo-
tent. There is virtually nothing it can do. Sometimes I miss not being
able to crawl around any more. But I am not much given to nostalgia’
(Malone Dies: 180).
This brutally amusing writing alleviates the gloom of the Beckett
play or novel, but it does add a certain uncanny frisson to our experi-
ence of the work: why are we laughing at this? How can there be
humor in such a depleted world? In an interview Beckett once said:
‘If there were only darkness, all would be clear. It is because there
is not only darkness but also light that our situation becomes inexpli-
cable’ (220).8 Beckett is the master of mixing light and dark, of humor
with pain, of the recognizable with the unfamiliar. The result is a
kind of writing that is consistently disorienting but not strange
enough to be fully alienating: we do recognize and respond to some-
thing in the work, a quality perhaps of shared suffering, of shared
despair and, be it ever so humble, shared compassion.
Readers often remark on the particular quality of Beckett’s sen-
tences, especially in the prose. Unlike that of his early master Joyce,
Beckett’s mature prose is crystalline in its concision. Indeed, Beckett
once remarked on the difference between Joyce’s method of compos-
ing and his own:
‘we are diametrically opposite because Joyce was a synthesizer, he

wanted to put everything, the whole of human culture, into one or
two books, and I am an analyzer. I take away all the accidentals
because I want to come down to the bedrock of the essentials, the
archetypal.’ 9
In Damned to Fame Knowlson quotes Beckett’s views on Joyce:

‘ “I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction
of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always
adding to it . . . I realised that my own way was in impoverishment,
in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than
in adding” ’ (319). And thus while Beckett’s sentences are easily
enough read (we may have to look up the odd word now and again),10
there is a slow-burn quality to this writing, as meanings and resonances
come to light, and apply pressure, long after we have passed over
5
the individual words. The famous line from Malone Dies, ‘Nothing is
more real than nothing’ (186), is an example of a sentence which snags
our attention with its peculiar use of a word or idea. Nothingness,
radical absence, the sentence suggests, is the most pressing reality
with which we must deal. The sentence’s circularity and repetition,
moreover, uncannily transfers absence into presence: nothing thus
becomes something as we feel its real claims on us. The sentence bril-
liantly demonstrates how a single word can shimmer with multiple
resonances: the first use of the word ‘nothing’ is very different from
the second. Indeed, the word seems simultaneously to have casual
and deeply philosophical meanings all of which fold into each other
and are exchanged. Malone, aware of the effects of his own words,
offers this commentary on this sentence: ‘I know those little phrases
that seem so innocuous and, once you let them in, pollute the whole
of speech . . . They rise up out of the pit and know no rest until they
drag you down into its dark’ (186–87).
Another related uncanny effect occurs when Beckett offers an idea
only to negate its claims immediately: ‘Live and invent. I have tried.
I must have tried. Invent. It is not the word. Neither is live’ (Malone
Dies: 189); ‘I am dead, but I never lived’ (Texts for Nothing 11: 333);
‘Say a body. Where none’ (Worstward Ho: 471). The final lines of
Molloy are perhaps the most famous example of Beckett’s self-
contradictory, self-cancelling rhetoric: ‘Then I went back into the
house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows.
It was not midnight. It was not raining’ (170). The effect, a dizzying
one, is to keep the reader consistently on her interpretive toes, prevent-
ing her from settling on any comfortable or comforting meaning.
This effect reaches its terminal point in Beckett’s late prose, in texts
like Worstward Ho. Beckett here forgoes conventional grammar,
character, plot, and story and presents language itself as character (in
this way we are justified in asserting, as suggested, that language is
always Beckett’s main concern). The language of the late texts is con-
tradictory and produces familiar vertiginous effects:
Worsening words whose unknown. Whence unknown. At all costs

unknown. Now for to say as worst they may only they only they.
Dim void shades all they. Nothing save what they say. Somehow
say. Nothing save they. What they say. Whosesoever whencesoever
say. As worst they may fail ever worse to say. (478)
6
INTRODUCTION
Surely this is some of Beckett’s most challenging, most difficult

writing. But if we listen to it carefully we can attend to themes he will
explore throughout his career. We can hear Beckett’s obsessive return
to the rhetoric of ‘nothing’; we encounter his interest in ‘failure’ as a
trope of writing; we see his interest in moving past the barriers of
conventional language to explore the limits of what can be said and
not said (or missaid) in language which is itself dead or spectral:
‘void shades’. Beckett, for all his difficulty, can be read clearly because,
as I explore in detail below, his writing gives us the interpretive clues
we need. An interpretive dizziness is a given when reading Beckett:
what we do with that dizziness, how we choose to interpret our
moments of uncertainty, becomes our task, our obligation.
THE DIFFICULTY OF READING BECKETT: GENRE,

NOTHINGNESS, THE POSTHUMAN BODY
Genre
The year 2006 was the centenary of Samuel Beckett’s birth. At vari-
ous festivals and conferences his works were performed, discussed,
and criticized. Indeed, even the mainstream media, usually oblivious
to the work of the literary avant-garde, took notice if only to recycle
the primary critical clichés about Beckett’s work: it is bleak, difficult,
and ‘about’ the absurdity and meaninglessness of existence. This last
cliché, given at least tacit support by Beckett himself, is one this
Guide will in part seek to dismantle, but for now we need to acknowl-
edge the truth of what is generally perceived about Beckett’s work: its
uncompromising difficulty.11 We are presented, in both the drama
and prose, with unfamiliar and seemingly unreadable situations: two
tramps on a near-empty stage, waiting; a blind tyrant, accompanied
by his crippled parents and a peevish servant, yearning for his life
(and the play he seems to know he is in) to end; a play in which a
mouth, speaking in near incomprehensible language, is the main
‘character’; an old man, lying in bed, telling stories until he dies.
And one could go on, and we shall here, listing the myriad difficul-
ties posed by Beckett’s work. At a basic level, however, we notice one
common feature of these texts, one link which may be our interpre-
tive entry point: they all deliberately dismantle generic expectation.
That is to say, every Beckett text defies our notions of what a play or
a novel should be doing. If we recognize this generic ‘decomposition’
7
as Beckett’s primary method of problematizing interpretive proto-

cols, we come to an important initial realization: Beckett’s texts resist
being interpreted and categorized and this may in fact be what they
are about, the problem of interpretation itself.
This Guide thus will begin with an analysis of the way Beckett
manipulates genre in his work. Waiting for Godot, for instance, is a
drama in name only: if the root of the word ‘drama’ is the Greek for
‘action’, Beckett is deliberately writing a drama that is not, in fact, a
drama at all (nothing happens in the play; or, more precisely, nothing
happens: the experience of nothingness is what the play is about).
The novels of Beckett’s first trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The
Unnamable) again, are novels in name only: as this trilogy progresses,
there is a diminishing of plot and a removal of all identifiable char-
acters within identifiable space and time. Beckett’s late prose and
drama blurs the distinction between genres: How It Is, a ‘novel’, reads
like poetry; A Piece of Monologue (1982), a ‘play’, reads like a short
prose story; Beckett’s last major work, in the so-called second trilogy
(Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho), reduces the very lan-
guage of prose to nongrammatical clauses, and places ‘characters’
(who function merely as grammatical indices, may indeed only ‘be’
disembodied grammatical indices) in locations that are beyond life
and death.
It is my suggestion that the trajectory of Beckett’s career as
dramatist and novelist traces a systematic deconstruction of the very
premises of drama and prose, a deconstruction that witnesses the
simultaneous and systematic dismantling of the self, or subject, who
would rely on narrative as a means of self-understanding. I propose
here to suggest that this deconstruction, this dismantling of all
received structures of subjectivity and narrative, be it in prose or
drama (and his characters on stage are only ever telling stories), is the
major theme of Beckett’s work and, of course, the cause of the major
difficulties in the reading of this work.
Once we understand that Beckett’s method is to call into question
the very premises of drama and prose, we may be better able to
understand what I see as his major purpose: to call into question all
those methods—narrative being the primary one—we have of under-
standing ourselves. Genres come ready built with meaning and
expectation: plays and novels have structures—beginnings, middles,
endings; character and plot ‘development’; settings—that readers natu-
rally assume should be in place. Plays and novels have recognizable
8
INTRODUCTION
characters and tell stories that, while perhaps confusing and challeng-
ing, assume what we can call ‘knowability’. That is, these narratives
are assumed to reflect a recognizable reality, one to which the reader
can orient herself. A central, if unspoken, assumption of what is called
classic realist literature, is that narrative itself is a natural and author-
itative way of communicating reality.12 Language, in other words, is
the adequate vehicle for representing reality, and most importantly,
for representing the self; in classic realist fiction, crucially, the self—
think, for instance, of Dickens’ David Copperfield—precedes language
and uses it, controls it, to transcribe his reality.
Beckett is working to reveal all these expectations as artificial and
constructed. He indicates that we construct ourselves as selves in the
stories we tell, the histories we construct, and thus his dismantling
of these narratives is his way of examining the very fragility, the very
constructedness, of the human and human understanding itself.
Narrative and other generic conventions are ways of controlling
experience, of shaping experience; they are not unproblematic reflec-
tions of experience. In the end, however, by systematically reducing
narrative to its essence, to what he calls its ‘worsening words’, Beckett
discovers the persistent essence of the human, whose narratives ‘fail
again’ and ‘fail better’, but who is insistently present in that failure,
if only as a trace, specter, or ghost of itself. My argument, ultimately,
is that for all Beckett’s seeming difficulty and negativity, his novels
and plays work systematically to celebrate, if in an inverse way, the
human subject who will not cease to narrate and who will, thus,
always be.
REDUCTION TO THE ESSENTIALS: NOTHINGNESS

AND THE POSTHUMAN
To begin, perhaps we should acknowledge that while Beckett’s work
explores questions concerning the fundamental nature of the human,
Beckett himself will seem to be of little help to us in interpreting that
work. Although he has offered some important, if opaque, critical
insights into what appears to be a personal philosophy of art and life,
Beckett tended to resist offering direct interpretations of his work,
resisted offering what a character in his novel Watt calls ‘semantic
succour’ to his readers, his actors, his directors. When, for instance,
Alan Schneider, a friend and director of many of Beckett’s plays,
asked for Beckett’s interpretation of Endgame, Beckett replied ‘I simply
9
can’t write about my work, or occasional stuff of any kind’. He went

on to excoriate journalists and critics:
But when it comes to these bastards of journalists I feel the only

line is to refuse to be involved in exegesis of any kind . . . My work
is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended), made as
fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else. If
people want to have headaches among the overtones, let them.
And provide their own aspirin. (No Author Better Served: The
Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider: 24)
It is curious to note the way Beckett resists interpreting his work

yet at the same time provides something of a clue to reading: his
work, he says, is a ‘matter of fundamental sounds’. One way of
understanding this comment, and certainly this is the way I tend to
read his work, is to notice how Beckett tends to strip away all excess
on stage and page: he is after an analysis of the fundamentals, the
core, or ‘essence’ of what maps out human experience. There is no
accidental word or occurrence in a Beckett text, no distraction from
the real business of trying to understand what it means to be. Hence,
for instance, a novel like Malone Dies, where there is only one char-
acter, immobilized in bed and thinking about his impending death.
Here Beckett is asking a crucial, perhaps the fundamental, question:
What does it mean to exist, to be, at the moment when your life is on
the verge of flickering out? Can we recognize what it truly means to
be alive, what we may call the fundamental impulse of being, only
when life itself is about to cease? Beckett pares plot, character, and
language down to its essentials, stripping away the ‘meat’ (of both
prose and character) to examine life lived at extreme limit points.
Indeed, as I have indicated, in later texts such as Worstward Ho, the
first sentence of which reads ‘On. Say on. Be said on. Somehow on.
Till nohow on. Said nohow on’ (471), Beckett reduces plot and char-
acter so radically that it is possible to say that we have text where
grammar, itself functioning at the limit of comprehensibility, indi-
cates a subjectivity on the verge of nothingness.
By writing about fundamental sounds Beckett presents himself as
an intensely curious and courageous writer. Curious about the pre-
cise nature of the human being, Beckett takes himself and his readers
to the extreme limits of humanity and asks us, obliges us, to look
carefully at ourselves at moments of crisis. These moments of crisis
10
INTRODUCTION
work in Beckett as points of fundamental, if compromised and opaque,

revelation: it is here, at the point where the world ceases to make
sense or correspond to one’s presuppositions, that the real, the fun-
damental interpretive and ethical questions arise: How do I go on in
the face of this crisis of meaning? What is my responsibility to myself
and others when meaning collapses?
These moments of the collapse of meaning, of the crisis of interpre-
tation, are central to Beckett’s work (indeed we may say they comprise
the totality of the work) and to his philosophy of art. In some ways
Beckett’s real interest is in the encounter, existential, artistic, and
interpretive, with what he importantly refers to as ‘Nothing’. The
experience of nothing, the nothingness realized in the boredom of
Didi and Gogo in Waiting for Godot (the first line of which is ‘Nothing
to be done’), the nothingness that threatens our interpretive security,
what Clov in Endgame calls the ‘zero’ point of meaning, the nothing-
ness of loss and absence that informs so densely the later trilogy, is
one that paradoxically (how do you write about ‘nothing’?) articu-
lates and motivates Beckett’s own work.
In 1949, Beckett published Three Dialogues, a series of pseudo-
dialogues between ‘B’ and ‘D’. B, who critics identify as Beckett
himself (rightly I believe), offers what has become perhaps the most
often cited entry point into Beckett’s own work. B has been discuss-
ing modern art and comes to offer his own view of the proper subject
matter and motivations of the modern artist:
B.—Yet I speak of an art turning from it in disgust, weary of its

puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able,
of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little
further along a dreary road.
D.—And preferring what?
B.—The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with
which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to
express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to
express. (556)
A number of things are crucial here. First, notice how B expresses

a weariness with artistic convention, how the idea of ‘doing a little
better the same old thing’ bores him (this is an idea to which we will
return). It is clear even relatively early in his career that Beckett would
not be creating conventionally familiar art. Notice, second, how the
11
word ‘nothing’ gathers a kind of incremental resonance in this final

sentence, how it becomes clear that nothing, to speak perhaps para-
doxically, becomes something, something to be explored as a theme,
as a reality (we may recall that line from Malone Dies: ‘Nothing is
more real than nothing’). As this astonishing sentence concludes
Beckett acknowledges a personal ethical obligation as an artist, an
obligation to observe, analyze, and express these moments when the
nothing arises—perhaps even against his own will—and appears
to nullify meaning, to threaten our comfort, to erase our grasp of
the real.
‘POSTHUMANISM’
To have based a career on the exploration of ‘nothing’ may seem per-
verse to some. Certainly the reader’s encounter with Beckett’s various
representations of the void, of absence, of loss will be a difficult one
for the simple reason that Beckett’s world is difficult to bear. And
some readers over the years have found in Beckett’s work a certain
ruthless, perhaps even a cold inhumanity. If we trace the trajectory
of Beckett’s work, on both stage and in prose, we do notice that his
systematic reduction of things, what I have suggested is his reduction
to the ‘fundamentals’, does involve the reduction of the human self,
what I will in this study be referring to as the ‘subject’. Notice how
for instance, in the drama, we move from fully embodied subjects in
Waiting for Godot, to the less physically able characters in Endgame
(Hamm is blind and crippled; Clov can only walk in a stiff-legged
gait; Nagg and Nell both have lost their legs), to characters immobi-
lized in urns in Play, to the disembodied Mouth of Not I. A similar
trajectory holds in the first prose trilogy: Molloy, whose body is fail-
ing yet able; Malone who is immobilized in bed; the unnamable, who
may simply be a brain in an urn. In the later prose texts, it is difficult
even to determine precisely the nature of the human and the status of
its body, ‘Say a body. Where none. No mind. Where none. That at
least. A place. Where none. For the body. To be in’ (471).
Beckett seems to strive throughout his career to rid his work of the
body, to work thus toward what we may call a kind of posthumanism.
Posthumanism can be defined as that strand of philosophy which
radically critiques the idea that the individual subject is the center of
all things, the beginning and end of all knowledge and experience:
this is therefore a radical critique of Humanist philosophy which would
12
INTRODUCTION
posit the human’s reason and rationality as being transparently avail-

able to the thinking subject. Posthumanism begins by countering
Humanism’s belief that the human is self-producing, self-coincidental,
that it is somehow responsible for the production of its world and its
experience of the world.
As a philosophy, posthumanism can be traced to many sources,
but the thinking of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud is crucial. Each
worked to suggest that the human subject is not self-producing or
self-coincidental, but is, rather, produced by its culture (Marx), its
language (Nietzsche), and its unconscious drives and instincts
(Freud). Posthumanism strives to understand the precise economies
of these forces and asks questions like these: How is the human
subject to rather than the master of language? How does the subject
negotiate her relation to the drives—toward Eros, Thanatos—that
Freud posits? How can the subject free itself, if at all, from the cul-
tural forces of capital, ideology, and religion, forces which precede
and exceed the subject’s experience?
These are all Beckett’s questions and he will work out answers in
plays like Happy Days and novels like Murphy and The Unnamable,
texts which are about how the subject negotiates a relation to culture
(Happy Days), to the drives (Murphy), to language (The Unnamable).
But we should also note how Beckett’s posthumanism becomes
uncannily literalized in his middle-to-late-period drama and prose.
Beckett is interested in exploring the very limits of the human, the
very essence of what constitutes the human. To this end Beckett will
push the human past our common conceptual boundaries; that is to
say, at times he moves his characters into the space of death, of what
is, perhaps, a kind of afterlife.
In the prose this thematic begins with Malone Dies, a novel tracing
the moment a man passes into inexistence; in the drama, it begins
with Play, which sees three characters in what appears to be an after-
life (the characters are in funeral urns) bickering over the narrative of
their past lives; in the second trilogy we can easily imagine, indeed
should imagine, that the speakers of the texts, as well as the figures
that appear in the narratives, are specters, ghosts. I explore the figure
of the ghost, the specter—the literal posthuman—in detail in my
final chapter, but I just wish to indicate here how Beckett’s interest
in paring things down to the essentials leads logically to an interest in
the specter, the ghost, which becomes the image of the human after
all things have been stripped way. Precisely, the ghost becomes a trace,
13
a mark, of the human’s passing out of existence but—and this is

absolutely central—the ghost is an insistent reminder of the human
that once was. The specter, in other words, serves to recuperate the
human even as the human passes into oblivion: the specter thus
becomes what Slavoj Zizek calls the ‘indivisible remainder13’. To put
it bluntly, for Beckett the total elimination of the human is a total
impossibility.
Perhaps, Beckett suggests, we can only find the nature of the
human, what he calls ‘the bedrock of the essentials’, at the moment
the human exchanges one state for another, one reality for another.
Perhaps only the absence of the human (the specter) truly reveals
what has been the human’s true nature. And what is for me fascinat-
ing, and crucial, about this process is the way Beckett eliminates the
human at precisely the same time as he eliminates, denatures, and
deconstructs, narrative form itself. In some ways Beckett is arguing
that language itself must be eliminated in order for the specter, the
ghost, the posthuman, to appear: language must be eliminated in
order for the truth of the human to be known.
We may see in this reduction a kind of cruel treatment of the
human, a perverse interest in illness and decay, but I think this would
be a fatal interpretive error. Certainly Beckett’s work implies that the
body is always a liability, something that will inevitably fail (an hilari-
ous line from Malone Dies suggests this: ‘If I had the use of my body
I would throw it out of the window’ [212]). But we must notice that
the body, or signs of the body, never fully disappears from Beckett’s
world. The persistence of the body, the fragmented body, the disem-
bodied body, is one of Beckett’s major themes and one that poses
some of his most interesting interpretive questions and challenges:
why does Beckett work to reduce and fragment the body? How are we
to interpret fragments of humanity?
One answer to these questions relates to what I have said above
about Beckett reducing things to the fundamentals in order to under-
stand the essence of the human: in Play and Not I, Beckett seems to
be suggesting that these characters really only are their voices, really
only are, to be more precise, their narratives. What matters to them,
at this specific place, at this specific time, is their ability—perhaps
their compulsion, their obligation—to speak. Beckett would seem to
be suggesting that the totality of the body, at this specific moment, is
not terribly important to the subject as she tries to understand her
present situation. But, as I suggest, we do notice that Beckett never
14
INTRODUCTION
fully removes the body, or the signs of the body (voice, for instance),
entirely: the stories his characters tell, his work seems to imply, are
written on and through the body. Stories are translated, in other
words, by the body. Beckett’s characters may be posthuman but they
are not fully postcorporeal.
Another way of putting this idea, admittedly one of Beckett’s most
challenging, is that subjectivity—that sense the human has of itself
as a thinking, interpreting creature—is fully dependent on the body.
Subjectivity is embodiment: you are your body and your body’s desires,
as much as you are your mind. And thus while the body is an impedi-
ment and will always decay and fail, the body cannot disappear
in Beckett because the self, and the self’s understanding of itself,
would as well. There is, as I read it then, a kind of dark compassion
in Beckett for the compromised body, for the crippled and the ill:
there is a compassion for the suffering subject who can really only
understand herself and her world through the medium of a decaying,
painful, body. Our questions, as readers of Beckett, must now become:
if the self understands itself through the compromised, spectral,
body, what kinds of interpretations will it make? If the self under-
stands the world through its fragmented, posthuman body, what
kinds of interpretations of the world can be made?
‘POSTHUMANISM’: A PROVISO
These are all Beckett’s questions but I wish to offer something of a
proviso before continuing. I suggested above that Beckett is striving
for a ‘kind of’ posthumanism. I think it is best always to use terms
provisionally with Beckett for surely one of the effects of his work
is to call absolutely into question the very idea of stable categories,
stable oppositions (‘human-posthuman’). Perhaps it is best here, at
the outset, to suggest that his work critiques the idea of the human
and the posthuman equally. Precisely, by discovering the persistence
of the human even in its most denuded form, Beckett essentially col-
lapses the opposition ‘human-posthuman’ to the point where the
terms become interchangeable, and hence almost meaningless.
That is to say, for Beckett we are always already posthuman inso-
far as we are controlled by discourses (history, ideology, language)
preceding and exceeding us; we are always already posthuman as we
discover that our bodies are sites of inevitable failure and collapse;
we are always already posthuman insofar as the idea of a singular
15
self is an illusion. Beckett acknowledges these ideas early in his career;

in Proust (1931) he acknowledges that the self is not a stable subject
but rather that the ‘individual is a succession of individuals’ (515);
moreover, ‘The subject has died—and perhaps many times—along
the way’ (513). My use of the term ‘posthuman’ then is something of
a convenience, a way of speaking ‘about’ or ‘around’ the peculiarities
of the Beckettian subject, the subject who always must negotiate his
reality via systems of thought—language being the primary—whose
parameters and protocols are always just beyond his full control.
THE PROBLEM OF INTERPRETATION

Beckett’s manipulation of genre, his reduction and dismantling of
the subject, his relentless interest in the various aspects of ‘nothing-
ness’ (loss, absence)—he calls this his ‘fidelity to failure’ (‘Three
Dialogues’: 563)—lead, as I have been suggesting, to some fairly
acute interpretive difficulties. Hans-Georg Gadamer, a philosopher
of the hermeneutic school (and student of Martin Heidegger), sug-
gests that all real interpretation, or ‘hermeneutics’, begins with
identifying a specific location of doubt or unease in a text. As he
writes in Philosophical Hermeneutics: ‘The real power of hermeneuti-
cal consciousness is our ability to see what is questionable’ (13). We
need, in other words, to be able to ask the proper questions of texts.
But in Beckett our problem becomes seemingly intractable because
everything in the text appears to be questionable. How are we to
interpret texts that seem, paradoxically, to offer so many questions
and then resist or foreclose the possibility of answering those ques-
tions? How, in other words, are we to read Beckett?
I will suggest here, in ways that look back to Beckett’s own sense of
obligation (recall his sense, expressed in Three Dialogues of the ‘obli-
gation to express’), that our interpretations of Beckett should begin
by paying careful attention to the ways in which his texts anticipate
our difficulties and perhaps offer some guidance. If we are puzzled by
certain things—Who are these characters? What are their histories?
Where and when exactly are these stories occurring? What exactly
does it all mean?—we should recognize that our perplexity with
the text is mirrored by the characters’ own perplexity about their
worlds. The reader’s situation of puzzlement is precisely that of the
characters and thus we arrive at a crucial observation: Beckett’s texts
themselves will set out the ground rules for interpreting his world.
16
INTRODUCTION
We notice, for instance, that characters in Beckett recognize they

inhabit worlds in which meaning seems to have absented itself;
they seem even to recognize that the words they use to describe their
worlds are no longer meaningful. When Clov is asked by Hamm
about the meaning of the word ‘yesterday’ he erupts: ‘That means
that bloody awful day, long ago, before this bloody awful day. I use
the words you taught me. If they don’t mean anything any more,
teach me others. Or let me be silent’ (122). The opening lines of The
Unnamable see a character asking questions of himself that surely
become the reader’s: ‘Where now? Who now? When now?’ (285). In
the novel Watt, the eponymous main character comes up against the
extreme limits of interpretation and begins to lose his grip on reality.
Watt’s loss of the real begins when he notices that it is difficult to pin
meaning down, and in a question that goes to the heart of the matter
the narrator asks: ‘But what was this pursuit of meaning, in this
indifference to meaning? And to what did it tend?’ (227). To recog-
nize what is questionable in Beckett is to recognize that the question
is being asked in the text, by the text itself. Our interpretive task here
is not to shy away from the difficulties in these texts but to recognize
how interpreting that difficulty becomes, in some fundamental way,
the main theme of Beckett’s work.
Because we must notice something essential about Beckett’s char-
acters: they all are, perhaps even without realizing it, in search of
meaning; they all are, in other words, interpretive creatures (just as
their readers and audiences are). Beckett’s characters may inhabit a
‘corpsed’ world in which there is ‘nothing to be done’, but they all
never cease in the attempt to discover something meaningful. Now,
of course, Beckett’s world is not one to offer some kind of easy con-
solation; this is not a world in which comfort will often, if ever, be
found. Perhaps the best description of Beckett’s world is that it is
‘haunted’ by the absence of meaning. This metaphor—one which
may account for the recurrence of spectral, ghostly characters in his
late drama and prose—suggests not precisely the absence of mean-
ing, but a world in which meaning did occur, where meaning once
existed. Beckett’s characters exist in a world where only spectral
traces of meaning exist: this is the twilight of meaning, the memory
of meaning. The pain of the Beckett character is in the realization
that meaning once did exist; and because it once did exist, there is
a sense, and not necessarily a positive one, that it can be captured
again.
17
Beckett’s characters thus function in a state of profound regret and

agony—often repressed and disavowed—over what might have been.
In Krapp’s Last Tape, for instance, Krapp retraces his past history
through tape recordings of his own voice to revisit a moment of pos-
sible, though now forever lost, happiness. Krapp’s own voice, his own
history, is spectral because his recordings are of a dead and irretriev-
able past, but one which clearly still haunts him now. In what is surely
one of Beckett’s most painful—and intensely compassionate
moments—we see how a ghostly history brutalizes Krapp:
Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be unin-
habited . . . Here I end this reel. Box . . . three, spool . . . five.
Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of hap-
piness. But I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in me
now. No, I wouldn’t want them back. (229)
Beckett does not, as the critical cliché may have it, merely represent a
world of absurdity, a world without meaning. This is a world that
continually feels the claims of the past, of history. And there is a
meaning in discovering these claims, a meaning in recognizing one’s
indebtedness to the past, a meaning in realizing that one’s obligation
is to come to terms with these claims and debts.
THEORETICAL APPROACH: THE ‘LITERATURE OF THE

UNWORD’, MELANCHOLY, AND THE ARCHIVE
Part of my purpose here in this Guide is to provide ways of making
sense of Beckett’s difficult work. One way I will proceed will be to
draw on the work of philosophers, theorists, and critics whose ideas
allow us to understand the complexity of Beckett’s universe. I will
here be drawing on the likes of phenomenologists Martin Heidegger,
Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Emmanuel Levinas, marxist Theodor
Adorno, psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, and
deconstructionist Jacques Derrida. I believe that the work of these
theorists can effectively unpack certain interpretive problems in
Beckett just as I believe that certain moments in Beckett—I think of
Mouth’s entry into language in Not I—can effectively illustrate the
interpretive problems in the work of some theorists (indeed I will use
Not I to illustrate Lacan’s difficult notion of the Real). My intention
is not, therefore, simply to read Beckett through a particular theory
18
INTRODUCTION
but to imagine that there is a mutual process of interpretation and

interrogation occurring between theorist and fiction.
THE GERMAN LETTER

I also believe, perhaps naively, that Beckett himself is his own first
and best critic. As I have mentioned Beckett offered few critical com-
mentaries on his work over the years but those that have come down
to us—as for instance, Three Dialogues—are of great value to any
reader. In the latter chapters of this study I will be referring often to
Beckett’s German Letter of 1937 and especially to his notion of the
‘literature of the unword’, a concept I think is central to the progres-
sion of his work. I wish, therefore, to take some space here and
outline the importance of this Letter.
In 1936 Beckett traveled to Germany on what essentially was an
art holiday: he visited several art galleries and, although angered by
the Nazi regime’s censoring of art it considered decadent, he was
greatly impressed—and influenced—by the work he saw. The trip
served as a kind of spiritual and philosophical awakening, as his dia-
ries attest. The German Letter is part of a correspondence between
Beckett and a friend (Axel Kaun, whom he met in Germany) written
three months after his return to Dublin. In the Letter Beckett speaks
of the need to move past received discourses and conventions, to lib-
erate himself from traditional languages and forms. I quote at some
length:
It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for

me to write an official English. And more and more my own lan-
guage appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to
get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it. Grammar and
Style. To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Victorian
bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true gentleman. A mask.
Let us hope the time will come, thank God that in certain circles it
has already come, when language is most efficiently used where
it is being most efficiently misused. As we cannot eliminate lan-
guage all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that
might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole
after another in it, until what lurks behind it—be it something or
nothing—begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal
for a writer today. (171–72)
19
In my estimation the full implications of the Letter, which for me

is Beckett’s artistic manifesto, will not be realized until the later nov-
els (especially the trilogies), but we should recognize how Beckett’s
stated impatience with traditional form resonates into even the early
prose and drama. Beckett’s disdain for ‘official English’, for ‘Grammar
and Style’, things as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit, speak to
a frustration, a boredom even, with the logic and trajectories of the
nineteenth-century novel. He speaks, further, to how music and
painting have found ways of moving beyond traditional form in order
to represent silence and absence (things not associated with represen-
tative art); he suggests that language itself must be shattered in order
to reveal what was previously unrepresentable.
And while Beckett’s manifesto sounds avant-garde, his idea that
language is a veil to be torn apart looks back to the Romantics and
their notion that poetry works to reveal the unseen. Beckett’s ‘my
own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart’ echoes
Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry and his sense that poetry lifts ‘the veil
from the hidden beauty of the world and makes familiar objects be
as if they were not familiar’ (117). There is, of course, a world of dif-
ference between lifting and destroying the veil—the difference,
perhaps, between the Romantic and the Modern!—but Beckett’s
desire as a writer is a familiar one: his work will attempt to show the
world in a new way. In my reading, Beckett’s tearing of the veil
becomes the perfect metaphor for the process of revealing, overtly,
self-consciously, and critically, the implications of art, here the novel
and drama, in a new way.
THE ‘LITERATURE OF THE UNWORD’

In the last paragraph of the Letter Beckett suggests that this process
of destroying language, of revealing its ‘terrible materiality’ (172)
will eventually lead to what he calls a ‘literature of the unword’ (173).
I wish in what follows to suggest that Beckett’s entire career as a
writer finds its beginning and end, its ground and goal, in this idea,
stated in 1937. A literature of the unword is, obviously, a contradic-
tion in terms, a paradox, an aporia (to use the Derridean construction);
a literature of the unword is an attempt to use language to silence
language (he calls it ‘An assault against words in the name of beauty’
[173]). His aim, essentially, is to find a means of decomposing and
moving beyond language, to shatter language into a kind of erasure
20
INTRODUCTION
of itself (this attempt to eliminate language is geometrically propor-

tional to his attempt to eliminate the body, as we will see). My
argument is quite simply this: throughout his career Beckett is search-
ing for the means to put an end to literature, to put an end to writing,
to put an end to his own desire to write. The trajectory of his work,
from the early drama and prose to the late, is one of radical reduc-
tion, of working to find a means to literature’s end. In the drama we
move from the fully embodied drama of Godot to the late ghostly
plays where often language does not even feature; in the prose we
move from the playful garrulousness of Murphy to the shattered syn-
tax and diminished grammars of Worstward Ho.14
It is precisely because Beckett’s work is grounded on such complex
philosophical contradictions—a writer writing literature out of
existence: impossible!—that I believe we must have recourse to the
various theoretical and philosophical traditions that arose simulta-
neous with Beckett’s own development as a writer. My theoretical
approach in this Guide can perhaps best be described as promiscu-
ous but I tend to think that a deconstructionist psychoanalysis is the
best way of proceeding with Beckett, at least for me. To illustrate
what I mean here—and by way of concluding this Introduction—
I wish to outline two concepts which will prove critical in my reading
of especially the drama.
MELANCHOLIA
A major theme in Beckett is that of memory, of characters, like
Krapp or Hamm, haunted by the ghost of memory. At a basic level
the Beckett character lives in a protracted state of regret and loss,
a state he or she may not even recognize as such. History, the past,
impinges profoundly on the character and, as Beckett writes in Proust,
threatens continually to ‘deform’ him. In 1917 Sigmund Freud pub-
lished an essay that has recently come to be seen as a crucial diagnosis
of a contemporary cultural condition. In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’,
Freud attempts to come to an understanding of how the subject deals
with trauma and loss. There are, he theorizes, two responses to loss,
to the loss of a loved one, or the ‘loss of some abstraction which has
taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, or so
on’ (252). The first and most healthy is what he calls mourning.
Mourning is a process by which the loss is comprehended and
accepted, ‘worked through’, to use his terminology. Mourning is the
21
normal way one must deal with trauma and loss, with what Freud
beautifully terms the ‘economics of pain’ (252). Precisely how the
subject overcomes loss is not known by Freud—it is a difficult pro-
cess; it is ‘work’—but eventually the mourner accepts that the loved
one, with whom he may have identified, is no longer here to makes
claims on him.
Melancholia, on the other hand, is an abnormal response to loss
and situates the subject in a continual position of narcissistic identi-
fication with the lost object. In other words, the melancholy subject
cannot accept that her loved one is in fact gone and works pathologi-
cally ‘to establish an identification of the ego with the abandoned
object’ (258). What this means is that the past—loss, trauma—con-
tinually works its way into the present moment because the subject
cannot move past it. More troubling is the idea that the subject does
not wish to allow loss to recede into history but desires continually to
maintain a connection to the traumatic moment. In some ways the
subject maintains this pathological state—which may in fact not be
so pathological after all—because the traumatic moment is impor-
tant for her, may in fact have shaped who she is.
We may diagnose a great number of Beckett’s characters as being
melancholic in Freud’s sense. They are haunted by the past and some,
like Krapp, Hamm, and Winnie, deliberately attempt to reconnect with
a past that includes moments of loss and extreme pain. In other words,
the function of memory in Beckett is largely melancholic precisely
because the characters acknowledge, consciously or unconsciously,
that they are the products of a past which has mercilessly defined them
as suffering subjects. Beckett’s characters cling so relentlessly to the
past because, for reasons we will explore, the present moment is devoid
of significance; the agonizing past may brutalize but in it are the traces,
the historical fragments of identity and meaning.
THE ARCHIVE
Deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, drawing heavily on Freud, offers
a second related concept that I will use to read these characters’ rela-
tion to history, loss, and trauma. In Archive Fever, Derrida analyzes
the concept of the archive as a way of coming to an understanding
of the way the subject negotiates its relationship to history, to the
past, and the future: the archive is, thus, a means by which Derrida
tries to understand the human as a being situated in time, feeling the
22
INTRODUCTION
claims of the temporal. Perhaps the best way to define the archive is
as a conceptual or material space of memory. The mind can serve as
an archive just as a library or physical monument can. Derrida sug-
gests that the archive is a place of commandment and commencement,
a place where events of the past are documented authoritatively as
marking the beginning of something, a life, a culture, a civilization.
Archives are spaces of preservation, conservation but also of creation:
a culture’s understanding of itself—a subject’s understanding of itself—
is created within the space of the archive.
It is clear that the archive is a way of materializing, making con-
crete, the past. And if history is largely, or can be largely, the narratives
of conquest, defeat, and violence, the archive is also going to function
as a space commemorating trauma and loss. It strikes me therefore
that the archive—as a space that maintains a continual relation to the
past—is always already a melancholy space. What I wish to suggest
here, in specific relation to Beckett’s work, is that the Beckettian sub-
ject becomes a literal embodiment of what I have elsewhere called the
‘melancholy archive’.15 The Beckettian subject, immobilized and
fragmented—think of Winnie, buried to her neck in earth in Happy
Days; of Mouth in Not I; of Malone in Malone Dies; of the figure in
Company—is always a historical subject, a subject, more precisely,
subject to, history. She is continually remembering, sometimes against
her will, what has occurred in the past; she is continually attempting
to recapture a past she may not fully comprehend.
And it is the Beckettian body which becomes the primary reposi-
tory for these remains, these traces, of history. The character may
exist—as in Happy Days, or Endgame—at what appears to be the end
of human culture, but she—her body—maintains the archival traces
of that lost culture. The images Beckett gives us in his drama and
prose—a disembodied mouth, a body immobilized in a wheelchair
or the earth, people in urns—are images that concretize the idea of
memory as embodied or archived. I suggested above that for Beckett
subjectivity—the sense of who we are—is fully dependent on the body.
What Freud and Derrida allow us to understand is the way subjectiv-
ity in Beckett is fully dependent on history and archived memory.
Freud’s notions of mourning and melancholia, together with the
Derridean reading of the archive, are concepts that will prove useful
in reading an author whose work is at a profound level always about
the past, a past which may have receded into forgetfulness but whose
claims are still being felt. In its strangeness Beckett’s work presents
23
numerous difficulties, but as we shall discover he never abandons

his reader or audience completely. First, as I have mentioned, his
characters—who at times become our surrogates, our uncanny dou-
bles—express much the same confusion about their worlds as the
reader; as such, the strangeness, because shared, becomes in a sense
normalized. Second, and perhaps more important, Beckett’s work
keys into fundamentally recognizable situations. We all are creations
of histories we may not recognize, or wish to recognize; we all at
times disavow our pasts even as we feel the pressures of history; we
all, in other words, are historical—in Freud’s terms, melancholy—
creatures. Beckett’s work is crucial because it relentlessly, remorselessly,
compels us to confront the profound claims that history must make
upon us all. As we come to recognize the claims of the past and real-
ize the extent to which history constructs the human subject, we begin
to understand that Beckett’s work, at times seemingly so strange,
seemingly inhuman, is only ever a compassionate attempt to compre-
hend humanity itself.
24
Part I
DRAMA
CHAPTER 2
WAITING FOR GODOT AND ENDGAME
The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary, he will

come only one day after his arrival, he will not come on the last day,
but on the last day of all.
—Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks
Waiting for Godot and Endgame are, in terms of length, the most
substantial plays in the Beckett canon. They mark the beginning of
Beckett’s career as a dramatist and sound the various themes he will
explore throughout his work.1 And while I will be discussing each
work separately, it might be useful here to ground our discussion
with one observation: both take place in unidentifiable places and
times. What is perhaps only clear about the plays’ spatial and tempo-
ral contexts is that they take place after: after a time in which
significant and meaningful action could have occurred; after some
cataclysm (Endgame); after familiar categories, such indeed as time
itself, have become redundant or defunct. In some crucial ways thus,
Beckett’s characters in both Godot and Endgame are situated in the
strange space of nostalgia and expectation: impossible nostalgia for
what has been—‘Ah, yesterday!’ (Endgame)—impossible expectation
for what may, but never does, come—‘We’re waiting for Godot’.
My reading of these plays works toward an interpretation of the
effect of Beckett’s dismantling of all familiar categories (genre, space,
time, character, action) and attempts ultimately to understand the
effect, on character and audience, of the displacement of time and
history as ordering principles. I will suggest that the deconstruction
of an understanding of time—as a linear, forward-moving event—
leads to a radical realignment of the understanding of ethical action.
I will therefore be exploring these questions: What kind of ‘present’
27
do these characters inhabit if they are continually looking to the past

or to the future for significance? What kinds of ethical responsibili-
ties arise when you remove ‘meaning’ from the present and place it in
the past or future? What happens when you realize that the past and
future are vacant categories? Ultimately, Beckett is exploring one
fundamental, yet extremely complicated, question: what orients my
ethical action, my responsibility to the other, in a universe seemingly
devoid of purpose and meaning?
WAITING FOR GODOT

Context and response
Waiting for Godot was written between October 1948 and January
1949, a time of particular pressure in Beckett’s creative life. This was
the period when Beckett was in the midst of writing his first prose
trilogy (all three texts were written between 1947 and 1950) and these
novels presented specific problems to him. The trilogy, much as the
drama would do, challenges generic expectation insofar as the novels
essentially are minute examinations of consciousness. As such the
novels have no real plot and take place in times and spaces difficult
to identify. The writing process was never easy for Beckett, and the
trilogy, with its representation of the vagaries of eccentric interiority,
was creative agony.2 Waiting for Godot was, as Beckett himself tells
us, a form of creative escape from the protracted abstractions of the
trilogy, a way of removing himself from the ‘wildness and ruleless-
ness’ of the ‘awful prose I was writing at the time’ (Bair: 381). Drama
would allow him to map the trajectories of real, concrete, characters
in the real space and time of performance. Much like the logical pro-
gression of a chess game (chess being one of Beckett’s obsessions),
Waiting for Godot would work itself out according to a kind of
relentless symmetrical logic: two characters, for two acts, waiting.
While it is true that the initial productions of Godot were met with
bafflement, audiences, encouraged by positive critical reviews,3 sub-
sequently warmed to it and it became the play to see. Its unfortunate
American premiere in Miami, billed as the ‘laugh hit of two conti-
nents’ and starring Bert Lahr (The Wizard of Oz) and Tom Ewell, is
perhaps the exception to this general tendency.4 Audience puzzlement
was—and still is—quite understandable given what the play offers:
two tramps on a stage, empty save for a mound of dirt, a road, and
28
a bare tree (which will suddenly grow five leaves between the first and
second acts), waiting for a man named Godot who does not appear.
The play is divided in two with all action symmetrically distributed.
In both acts three other characters appear, Pozzo and Lucky (a gre-
gariously cruel landowner and servant) and a boy who twice reports
that Godot will not come ‘this evening but surely tomorrow’ (43).
The drama of nothing

Vivian Mercier’s famous remark that Godot is a play in which ‘nothing
happens, twice’ is perhaps a good beginning point here, although we
will need to explore the resonances of Beckett’s ‘nothing’ if we are
properly to understand the concept’s philosophical importance to
the play. It is true to say at least this about Godot: it is like nothing
else ever seen on stage before. And this is true for the simple reason
that Beckett has presented an antidramatic drama. The word ‘drama’
comes from the Greek, meaning ‘action’. We come to the theater
expecting significant action to take place: Hamlet, a play also about
waiting and deferred action, at least gives us a play-within-a-play
(in which a murder is staged), the killing of Polonius, and a final
sword fight which sees the death of four characters. In Godot we get
characters talking, exchanging hats, eating carrots, and in one crucial
and paradoxically action-packed scene, we are presented with a char-
acter who performs an act of thinking.
Thus one of the main difficulties with Godot is that the play is not
doing what it is supposed to do: it is not telling us a story in any real
sense. When Estragon opens the play with his now famous ‘Nothing
to be done’ (3) we are confronted in some sense with the purest
negation of dramatic action in the history of drama. But the line is
complex: it refers at once to Estragon’s present context (he cannot
remove his boot, thus there is ‘nothing to be done’ about his discom-
fort), and to the general philosophical themes of the play. There is
nothing to be done about the present situation these characters find
themselves in: there is no escape from the knowledge of the necessity
of waiting. There may be nothing done in conventional terms in this
play but perhaps another kind of action will occur: the act of thinking,
of thinking while waiting, of being self-conscious about waiting.
More precisely, Godot, as Vladimir makes clear in his philosophically
nuanced response to Estragon’s opening gambit, is about confronting
that there is no solution to the problem of being (alive): ‘I’m beginning
29
to come round to that opinion. All my life I’ve tried to put it from me,
saying, Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven’t yet tried everything. And
I resumed the struggle’ (3).
Hugh Kenner, one of Beckett’s early and most astute critics, sug-
gests the play realigns audience expectation: ‘The substance of the
play is waiting, amid uncertainty. If there has never been a play about
waiting before, that is because no dramatist before Beckett ever
thought about attempting such a thing’ (32).5 Beckett has staged a
play about uncertainty, waiting, and boredom. Waiting for Godot,
from this perspective, begins to look like it may simply be ‘about’
what it says it is about: waiting. For some critics of a more existential
bent, thus, Godot becomes a perfect representation of what it means
to be, period: we have all waited in anxiety and hope for something.
Alain Robbe-Grillet, in an enormously influential early essay on Godot,
draws on the existential-phenomenological philosophy of Martin
Heidegger, especially Heidegger’s notion of ‘thrownness’. Heidegger’s
idea, worked out fully in Being and Time (a text which intersects in
fascinating ways with Godot), is that to be means simply to have been
thrown, without guidance or aid, into existence and told to live.6 To
be, according to Robbe-Grillet means, simply, to be there, in a space
without signposts:
Probably it is the theater, more than any other mode of repres-

enting reality, which reproduces this situation [of being] most
naturally. The dramatic character is on stage, that is his primary
quality: he is there . . . We grasp at once . . . this major function of
theatrical representation: to show of what the fact of being there
consists. (111; 120).7
Robbe-Grillet goes on to say that Godot ‘consists of nothing but

emptiness’ (114) but that because it is about nothing—this word con-
sistently arises!—the play is ‘misjudged in every way’ (114).
And here, with Robbe-Grillet’s remark (written, we need to point
out, in 1953, very early in the critical response to the play) we arrive
at a crucial moment in the reception and interpretation of Waiting
for Godot: the play about nothing becomes a play that means a great
many things. Humankind, as T. S. Eliot reminds us, ‘cannot bear very
much reality’8; humankind also cannot bear too much nothingness,
cannot, perhaps more accurately, conceive of nothingness. Certainly we
30
cannot allow a play about nothing simply to be a play about nothing.

Kenner remarks that Godot ‘is not “about”; it is itself; it is a play’ (31)
but from the outset audiences and critics have not allowed the play
‘to be about’ nothing and thus it has been subjected to all manner of
interpretive intervention.9 The play’s vagueness—the way it refuses
to specify where and when the action occurs and who precisely
Vladimir, Estragon, Pozzo, and Lucky are—strikes many as an indi-
cation that Beckett is presenting an allegory here. The gaps in the
play would seem to allow the audience to read it in many ways and
thus ironically the primary characteristic of the play, its difficulty, is
not permitted to stand, is in fact erased, in the critical readings. In
what follows I wish to rehearse some possible readings, look closely
at the play’s most persistent interpretation—that it is about God and
revelation (or failed revelation)—and then offer my own reading,
that Waiting for Godot ultimately is ‘about’ its own interpretation
and a fundamental human desire for meaning.
Ties that bind

One of Beckett’s obsessions is the notion of inescapable relation-
ships. His plays and novels are filled with characters in painful
relationships which seem to offer nothing positive. Beckett referred
to the people in these relationships as ‘pseudo-couples’ because often
there is nothing formal (like marriage or blood relations) binding
them together. Vladimir and Estragon are the most prominent
pseudo-couple and offer the template of Beckett’s later exploration
of these curious bondings.10 They are bound together in a relationship
of dependency, affection, repulsion, and anger; they know full well
that they are not happy together—Estragon in fact says, ‘There are
times when I wonder if it wouldn’t be better for us to part’ (10)—but
they are unable to separate. Even though Estragon seems in the habit
of leaving Vladimir in the evenings (presumably to sleep alone), he
inevitably returns to suffer with him in the mornings:
Vladimir: You again! Come here till I embraced you.

Estragon: Don’t touch me.
Vladimir: Do you want me to go away? Gogo! Did they beat you?
Gogo! Where did you spend the night? . . . Who beat
you? Tell me.
31
Estragon: Another day done with.

Vladimir: Not yet.
Estragon: For me it’s over and done with, no matter what
happens.
...
Vladimir: I missed you . . . and at the same time I was happy. Isn’t
that a queer thing?
Estragon: Happy?
Vladimir: Perhaps it’s not quite the right word.
Estragon: And now?
Vladimir: Now? . . . There you are again . . . There we are again . . .
There I am again.
Estragon: You see, you feel worse when I’m with you. I feel better
alone too.
Vladimir: Then why do you always come crawling back?
Estragon: I don’t know. (50–2)
Estragon’s ‘I don’t know’ is, of course, a complex response to a

complex question. He returns for many reasons the primary probably
being the fact that he is in the habit of doing so; habit, as Vladimir
says, is ‘a great deadener’ (515).11 Vladimir and Estragon have become
used to one another and it is fair to suggest that while they are per-
haps happier away from each other, they truly only exist, or feel they
exist in any fundamental sense of the term, when they are together:
each needs the other to confirm his existence, however miserable,
however habitual.12
It is also clear that Vladimir and Estragon are tied together in a
mutual pact of waiting. Their bond thus echoes the more mysterious
bond that ties them to Godot:
Vladimir: Yes, in this immense confusion one thing alone is clear.

We are waiting for Godot to come—
Estragon: Ah!
...
Vladimir: Or for night to fall. We have kept our appointment and
that’s an end to that. We are not saints, but we have
kept our appointment. How many people can boast
as much?
Estragon: Billions. (72)
32
The minimum achievement of Vladimir and Estragon has been to

maintain some kind of word, their bond to Godot. In this sense the
play is about the effect of such bonds, such relationships. Vladimir
and Estragon know this:
Estragon: We’re not tied?

Vladimir: I don’t hear a word you’re saying.
Estragon: I’m asking you if we’re tied.
Vladimir: Tied?
Estragon: Ti-ed.
Vladimir: How do you mean tied?
Estragon: Down.
Vladimir: But to whom? By whom?
Estragon: To your man.
Vladimir: To Godot? Tied to Godot? What an idea! No question
of it. For the moment. (15)
And of course Beckett literalizes the bondage metaphor with Pozzo

and Lucky, another pseudo-couple tied together in a bond that
expressly speaks of power. It is not hard to see Pozzo as an allegori-
cal figure of the petty tyrant abusing the (ironically named) figure of
the servant, Lucky. Critics are fond of seeing in Pozzo and Lucky a
representation of philosopher Hegel’s notion of the Master-Slave
dialectic, a condition of inevitable power between the powerful and
the powerless in which both components of the relationship—master
and slave—require the other in a mutually supportive, hence dialecti-
cal—relationship. (Perhaps Pozzo even acknowledges his allegorical
status when he states ‘I am perhaps not particularly human, but who
cares?’ [22].) Pozzo becomes a concrete manifestation of the master
arbitrarily wielding power, a concrete manifestation, in some ways,
of what Godot could be in reality (Vladimir and Estragon wonder
if Pozzo is in fact Godot when they meet him for the first time).
Lucky, such a strange character, mute except for his performance of
thinking, simply becomes the figure of long suffering, the rope that
binds him to Pozzo the representation of that power. Lucky’s one
speech (35–37), a dis-articulate expression, demonstrates, perhaps,
the effect of power on the subject: his speech is an incoherent expres-
sion of anger suggesting that his resentment cannot be expressed
directly, coherently. His speech, his act of ‘thinking’, is a patchwork
33
of philosophical and cultural references (to God, to Bishop Berkeley,

to Shakespeare); working not as a sensible expression of pain, it
functions rather, rhythmically and aurally beyond the verbal, beyond
the comprehensible, as a pure performance of pain. His auditors’
agony on listening to the speech is perhaps an acknowledgment, as
witnesses, of Lucky’s despair, an acknowledgment that they at some
level are responsible for his pain: Pozzo for continuing his enslavement
of Lucky, Vladimir, and Estragon for not attempting to free him.13
It is crucial to notice how neatly Beckett arranges the play in terms
of the responsibilities and relationships which bind people together:
Vladimir and Estragon to each other; Vladimir and Estragon to
Godot; Pozzo and Lucky to each other. In some ways Beckett is ask-
ing a simple question: What keeps people together? It is habit; it is
power; it is, as we shall see, belief. Interpreting the play as a meditation
on the logic of relationships and power is, of course, to focus primar-
ily on concrete stage business, on, that is, the way the characters
interact with each other as pseudo-couples. But the one interpretation
that dominates discussion of the play, that it is a play about God,
begins by concentrating on absence, on what does not occur on stage.
I will suggest that interpreting Godot as God, or some kind of mes-
sianic figure, is still to think of the play in terms of relationships and
power, but now, given the radical absence that is Godot, we move
into more explicitly philosophical territory.
The absent God

It should be stated at the outset that Beckett regretted his use of the
name ‘Godot’. Peter Woodthorpe, who played Estragon in the British
premiere of Godot, recalls Beckett’s unhappiness with having chosen
the name ‘Godot’: ‘Beckett also said to me about “Godot” that he
deeply regretted calling it “Godot”, because everybody interpreted it
as God . . . He said it had nothing to do with God. He was almost pas-
sionate about it’ (Beckett Remembering, Remembering Beckett: 123–24).
Although the play was originally written and performed in French,
where the word ‘Godot’ would not necessarily call to mind the English
word ‘God’, Beckett’s protestations that the play is not about God
seems rather disingenuous (or at best rather naïve). Even if Godot
had had another name, the play would have religious resonances.
And certainly the numerous references to the Bible, God, Christ, and
34
crucifixions, do nothing to lessen the impression that something

more metaphysical than, perhaps, waiting for a prospective employer
to offer work, is afoot in the play. Indeed, early in the play Vladimir
and Estragon are discussing the Biblical story of the two thieves cru-
cified with Christ, one of whom repented and was saved. Immediately
following a heated discussion of the story (they engage in some tex-
tual exegesis, perhaps anticipating and echoing how Godot will be
subjected to analysis!) we hear for the first time the play’s refrain ‘Let’s
go. We can’t. Why not? We’re waiting for Godot. Ah!’ (8). Beckett is
nothing if not a careful composer and thus while he may deny the
religious readings of the play, the work itself—with its deliberate jux-
taposition of the idea of Christian salvation with the anticipated
arrival of Godot—seems to offer the possibility that it is about salva-
tion and redemption.
And indeed, the absent Godot and the response he seems to have
inspired in Vladimir and Estragon—a kind of agonized loyalty—
fits perfectly, perhaps too perfectly, into a specifically Pauline notion
of humankind’s relation to the deity.14 In Saint Paul’s letter to the
Philippians he writes that humankind needs to become responsible
for their own redemption. Paul, as the enlightened master, acknowl-
edges that he will not always be present to guide his flock, and thus
he states: ‘Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, not as in
my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your
own salvation in fear and trembling’ (Philippians 2:12).15 In The Gift
of Death philosopher Jacques Derrida comments on Paul’s letter:
If Paul says ‘adieu’ and absents himself as he asks them to obey,

in fact ordering them to obey . . . it is because God is himself
absent, hidden and silent, separate, secret, at the moment he has to
be obeyed. God doesn’t give his reasons, he acts as he intends, he
doesn’t have to give his reasons or share anything with us: neither his
motivations, if he has any, nor his deliberations, nor his decisions.
Otherwise he wouldn’t be God, we wouldn’t be dealing with the
Other as God or with God as wholly Other. (57)
Derrida’s analysis of the condition of the Christian believer speaks

to the existential condition of Vladimir and Estragon and perhaps
allows us to see their struggle as being one with some kind of end-
lessly compromised faith. Belief has become habit for Vladimir and
35
Estragon but this condition is one, as Derrida would suggest, entirely

consistent with the binding that occurs between believers and their
gods: ‘The disciples are asked to work towards their salvation not in
the presence ( parousia) but in the absence (apousia) of the master:
without either seeing or knowing, without hearing the law or the rea-
sons for the law’ (56–7).16 This is the religious equivalent of Heidegger’s
notion of ‘thrown-ness’: cast without guidance into the world, Vladimir
and Estragon fix on Godot, the absence that becomes fully present as
hope, as possibility:
Estragon: I can’t go on like this

Vladimir: That’s what you think.
Estragon: If we parted? That might be better for us.
Vladimir: We’ll hang ourselves tomorrow. Unless Godot comes.
Estragon: And if he comes?
Vladimir: We’ll be saved. (86)
The critique of belief: Time

But of course, Godot does not come, will never come. To read this
play as strictly about the Pauline God (or the Judaic messiah) is to
fail to notice that the play is more accurately understood as a critique
of the idea of salvation, of redemption, a critique that begins in the
play’s sustained deconstruction of a concept centrally related to the
idea of salvation: time. In Proust, Beckett defines time as ‘that double-
headed monster of damnation and salvation’ (511). And certainly
Vladimir and Estragon would seem to live in a time of hope, hope
for a salvation that may come. But this reading does not take into
account a central Beckettian conceit: the repetition of all things in a
time which seems no longer to function as time. To be saved at some
point in the future, as the messianic figure would have it, requires
a consistently forward-moving, linear temporal sequence. Time, in
other words, needs to function in conventional (Western) terms
in order for the future to come, for the future to be reached as such
within time.
Beckett begins to dismantle a conventional understanding of linear
temporality by clearly structuring the play on the logic of repetition.17
One implication of the play is that Vladimir and Estragon will be
endlessly returning to this spot, endlessly awaiting Godot. This circu-
larity and repetition—two days which see two appearances of Pozzo,
36
Lucky, and the Boy; two days which end with identical, sudden, and
wholly artificial risings of the moon; two days in which Godot does
not appear; two days which end in identical postures of stasis: ‘Let’s
go. They do not move’—clearly dismantles what we call the teleologi-
cal (end-oriented) structure of messianic thinking. And this not
merely because there seems to be no forward progression in this
repeating structure but, more ominously, because Vladimir and
Estragon (as much as Pozzo and Lucky) seem unaware for certain if
they are in fact repeating themselves, seem unaware, that is, of how
time itself functions. Estragon’s uncertainty as to whether he met
Pozzo and Lucky the day before, echoed by Pozzo’s ignorance of
Vladimir and Estragon in the second act (made perhaps somewhat
understandable by his unexplained sudden blindness), is simply a
manifestation of an inability to track or trace time, in this case the
past. And when Vladimir questions Pozzo about Lucky’s muteness in
the second act, Pozzo explodes:
Vladimir: Dumb? Since when?

Pozzo: Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed
time! It’s abominable! When! When! One day, is that
not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day
I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were
born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same sec-
ond, is that not enough for you? (82)
Pozzo’s speech, which does go to the heart of Beckett’s critique of

teleological and messianic time, suggests that the divisions of past,
present, and future do not function: there is only a now, a now of
Heidegger’s thrown-ness, a now of endless (because essentially time-
less) suffering. One of the refrains of Lucky’s speech is ‘time will tell’,
a line Beckett has Lucky repeat for thematic effect and that circulates
crucially through the play. The line is a cliché, certainly, but one
parodied, as it is repeated in Lucky’s speech in monstrously painful
circumstances, to the point of sense (and also perhaps of warning?):
time can no longer tell, can no longer narrate or reveal any truths—
and narratives perhaps, needing time in order to understood as such,
no longer can function—because time itself cannot function here in
this strangely liminal space of the play: ‘Time has stopped’ (30), as
Vladimir puts it so tellingly.
37
What I am suggesting here is that Beckett is critiquing—holding

up to critical scrutiny—the idea of the salvational moment. Godot
will not come today, but he must, Vladimir and Estragon believe, in
the habit of believers, come tomorrow. Beckett holds Vladimir and
Estragon up as types of the faithful, the hopeless faithful types of
those who must believe that significance will come. It may be possible
thus to read their ignorance of the recent past not merely as a symptom
of time’s dismantling, but as a willful act of repressing an awareness
of repetition. By denying repetition, by hallucinating that this is all
happening for the first time, Vladimir and Estragon can believe that
this now is singular, unique, as a pure moment of waiting and
expectation.
Interpretation and self-consciousness

But Beckett’s scrutiny of the desire for belief extends as equally to the
audience. The critics who read the play as being about God or the
salvational moment, as being about power, the Hegelian Master-Slave
dialectic, as being about France under Nazi rule, have all fallen into
the same belief trap that Vladimir and Estragon find themselves.
I think perhaps the best way to read this play is to begin with the sug-
gestion that if it is ‘about’ anything it is about the desire for belief.
More specifically, I wish to explore how the play, if it is an allegory,
is an allegory of interpretation; in other words Waiting for Godot is
about the way it is read by its audiences.
My suggestion that the play is about the act of interpretation itself
accounts in part for the play’s intense self-consciousness. I suggested
in the Introduction to this Guide that Beckett’s characters are all
anxiously self-aware: the same applies to the major dramatic works.
Waiting for Godot, in other words, knows it is a play, knows that it is
being watched and is under critical scrutiny. When Vladimir approaches
the front of the stage, faces the audience, and says ‘inspiring pros-
pects’ (8) or when he refers to the auditorium as a ‘bog’ (9), he
indicates an awareness of the play as spectacle, as something with an
audience (one he seems to despise or fear). When he suddenly needs
to relieve himself and ‘hastens towards the wings’ (28), Estragon says
‘End of the corridor, on the left’ (28) pointing out the existence of an
offstage (yet of course still fictional!) toilet not belonging to the world
of the play. In the second act Vladimir pushes Estragon toward the
38
auditorium where he catches sights of the audience and ‘recoils in hor-

ror’ (66). Much as the protagonist in Beckett’s Film suffers from ‘the
anguish of perceivedness’ (163), Estragon is horrified at the idea of his
existence being confirmed, perhaps even articulated, by an audience.
Vladimir complains of having been ‘better entertained’ (32) by the
actors on stage and, perhaps like the actual audience, grows bored:
‘I begin to weary of this motif’ (76). Pozzo is certainly a representa-
tion of petty tyranny, but it is also painfully obvious that he is always
acting a role, asking Vladimir and Estragon, after a long speech, ‘How
did you find me? Good? Fair? Middling? Poor? Positively bad? . . .
Bless you, gentlemen, bless you! . . . I have such need of encourage-
ment! I weakened a little towards the end, you didn’t notice?’ (31).
All these examples—and of course there are many more: the entire
play is massively self-conscious of its artifice—indicate a highly self-
aware play. The concomitant effect of this self-consciousness, I would
suggest, is the audience’s heightened awareness of their own active
role in the proceedings. And Beckett knows this: when Vladimir and
Estragon ritually exchange insults in the second act the ultimate term
of abuse, spoken as the stage directions put it, ‘with finality’, is
‘Crritic!’ (68). This moment indicates Beckett’s mistrust of his read-
ers but does also, of course, indicate an awareness that reading,
interpretation, and judgment—correct or incorrect—will take place.
One of the lovely symmetries of the play—in a play filled with sym-
metry—is that our position as readers of Waiting for Godot, the play,
is mirrored by Vladimir and Estragon’s reading of Godot, the char-
acter: all of us wish, perhaps, to make Godot and Godot be ‘about’
something, salvation or otherwise. But, as indicated above, Beckett
deliberately withholds or immobilizes the meaning of Godot, just as
he immobilizes Vladimir and Estragon in the final moments of each
act, an image, as I read it, of physical, psychological, and interpretive
paralysis: they are stuck in place just as they are tied to their depen-
dency on Godot, their need for Godot to mean something to them.
Why belief? Why faith?

If Vladimir and Estragon have fallen into the habit of belief, and we
are in some ways their doubles, Beckett would seem to be asking us
about our incessant, ceaseless desire for significance and meaning, a
questioning that reflects specifically on our desire to make this play
39
mean something, and generally onto our own existential condition

of thrown-ness. Why do we demand that things mean? Why do we
insist on creating meaning out of the nothingness of being? Why are
we unable to accept, as Pozzo suggests, that we live only in a now,
that we may in fact be blind to this moment, unable to see it for what
it really is? Why are we unable to accept, to quote one of the most
famous lines of the play, that we ‘give birth astride of a grave, the
light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more’ (82)? For surely
what the play relentlessly suggests is that Vladimir and Estragon,
for all their despair, will be back tomorrow poised expectantly for
the arrival of Godot: they may, in other words, intellectually accept
the existential truth of Pozzo’s vision of humanity, but their actions
speak endlessly to a belief in what Vladimir calls ‘hope deferred’ (5).18
Waiting for Godot thus finally is a play not about the absence of
meaning, is not about the messiah who fails to appear, is not about
the absent God: it is about asking us about our desire for such things
and the difficult realization that we create meaning in the face of
nothingness, to stave off that nothingness. We must notice, crucially,
that Beckett is not offering a nihilistic or despairing view of humanity.
He is suggesting that humankind is naturally hermeneutical, creates
meaning almost instinctively, but that we must take into account that
we are wholly responsible for the meanings we create, for the way,
to sound a major theme in the play, we invest in and tie ourselves to
significance.
I suggested above that Waiting for Godot is a critique of the idea of
salvation: a critique in itself cannot be nihilistic because it supposes
that there is some idea of value being analyzed and that the analysis
itself is vital. In this case the play wishes to get its audience to see
what damage is done by maintaining a loyalty to illusory ideas and
desires. Vladimir and Estragon have paid, are paying, and, it would
seem, will continue to pay, a high price for their relationship to the
absent Godot. At what point, Beckett asks, do we put away these
painfully sustaining beliefs and move on? Beckett, as in all things in
Waiting for Godot, answers the question, twice:
Vladimir: Well? Shall we go?

Estragon: Yes, let’s go.
They do not move. Curtain.
40
ENDGAME
Time was never and time is over.

—Endgame
Context: The essentials

Endgame, written in French between 1953 and 1957 (and entitled Fin
de partie), was Beckett’s favorite play. Godot, he confided to critic
Ruby Cohn, was badly constructed, ‘messy’ and ‘not well thought out’
(258).19 Endgame, which is a much more tightly structured and focused
play, shares familiar themes with Godot—the problems of time, pain-
ful relations, and self-consciousness—but distills these ideas in a
more forceful, one might even say brutal, manner. Indeed, Beckett
spoke fondly of the play ‘clawing’ its way into the consciousness of
its audience, the way it ruthlessly—though with no small amount
of compassion—demonstrated what Beckett felt to be Endgame’s
major theme, that ‘Nothing is funnier than unhappiness’ (104).20
Endgame is unique in Beckett’s work for coming ready-made with
an interpretive key. The play’s title refers to the third and final stage
of a chess match, the endgame, where most of the major pieces have
been exchanged and the two kings remain. When asked about the
meaning of the play by Lawrence Held (an actor playing the role of
Nagg in a late 1970s production), Beckett, a fanatical chess player,
responded: ‘Well, it’s like the last game between Karpov and Korchnoi.
After the third move both knew that neither could win, but they
kept on playing’ (Remembering Beckett: 206). Beckett’s interpreta-
tion indicates his sense that Endgame stages an extended moment
of futility where unhappy outcomes are known from the outset and
where, to return to a theme in Godot, habit overrules common sense.21
Hamm, Clov, Nagg, and Nell are trapped in what appears to be
an endlessly repeating end stage, a moment when nothing thrives
except irritation, unhappiness, and crucially, nostalgia for an irre-
trievable past.
Beckett is interested in extreme or limit sites, places real or psycho-
logical, where things are stripped down to a kind of barrenness, to
what philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls ‘bare life’.22 The presiding
metaphor of this play—endgame: the final stage of a game where
41
only the essential pieces are left—is the perfect visual image of this
extremity. Beckett pares things down to the essentials in a number of
ways in Endgame, but most crucially he reduces the mobility of three
of the four actors on stage: Hamm, the reigning tyrant of the play
(and surely an echo of Pozzo in Godot’s second act), is blind and
confined to a chair on wheels; Hamm’s parents, Nagg and Nell, have
lost their legs and have been placed, presumably by their son, in rub-
bish bins (in a clear allegory of Western culture’s treatment of the
elderly): ‘The old folks at home!’ (98)23; Clov, the only mobile charac-
ter in the play, moves with great, pained difficulty. Clearly, Beckett is
signaling that the body’s actions, its ability to do in traditional terms,
are not as crucial as what the body’s compromised state engenders:
an awareness of the primacy of thought, memory, and anxious self-
consciousness. Beckett will continue to pare back the body on stage
(and in his prose) over the years; but it is in Endgame that he first sig-
nals that the body is always already a liability, something that must
be removed in order for him to discover the essential nature of the
human.
Adorno and the postholocaust

One of the remarkable effects of the play is the way this reduced
stage world—a room, two windows, four actors—looks positively
bursting with activity when we realize that this room, this ‘shelter’ as
Hamm calls it, may be the last place on earth with human life. It may
be an exaggeration to call Endgame a postapocalyptic play, but cer-
tainly we get the sense that the action occurs in a time and space,
after. Something has occurred, whether it was a nuclear holocaust
(they are in a shelter) or a plague, to remove all traces of life from the
world.24 After Hamm complains that ‘nature has forgotten us’, Clov
says ‘There’s no more nature’ (99). And after Hamm asks Clov to go
to the window and ‘look at the earth’ (111), we hear this:
Clov: Let’s see. Zero . . . zero . . . and zero.

Hamm: Nothing stirs. All is—
Clov: Zer—
Hamm: Wait till you’re spoken to! All is . . . all is . . . all is what?
All is what?
Clov: What all is? in a word? Is that what you want to know?
Just a moment. Corpsed. Well? Content? (112–13)
42
Later in the play, Hamm echoes Clov’s horrific description saying

‘The whole place stinks of corpses’ (124). The sense thus is that this
now, for all intents and purposes—certainly for us and these charac-
ters—is the world. These are the remainders of humanity; bare, and
barely accommodated, these characters represent Beckett’s darkest
vision of what emerges and remains after the collapse of all societal
and cultural supports.
In a now classic essay, aptly titled ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’,
Theodor Adorno places the play in a specific historical context:
After the Second World War, everything, including a resurrected

culture, has been destroyed without realizing it; humankind con-
tinues to vegetate, creeping along after events that even survivors
cannot really survive, on a rubbish heap that has made even reflec-
tion on one’s own damaged state useless. (244)
Certainly Hamm, who wearily announces his intention to continue

‘this farce’ (101) with his opening gambit of ‘Me to play’ (92), is a
perfect emblem of Adorno’s postholocaust survivor unable to reflect
effectively (in a literal sense even, given his blindness) on his own
damaged state. This is a time of such desolation, a desolation which
would become almost comfortable if it were not for memory, that the
very idea of significance or meaning is met with derisive, corrosive
laughter. When, for instance, Hamm senses, oddly, that what is occur-
ring might actually have some kind of resonance, he asks in anguish
(Beckett’s crucial word): ‘What’s happening, what’s happening?’ Clov
responds: ‘Something is taking its course’ (100). The first time this
occurs Hamm seems immediately to forget his anguish, but later in
the play the moment repeats itself:
Hamm: What’s happening?

Clov: Something is taking its course.
Hamm: Clov!
Clov: What is it?
Hamm: We’re not beginning to . . . to . . . mean something?
Clov: Mean something! You and I, mean something! Ah, that’s
a good one! (114)
Adorno suggests that Endgame signals the terminal point of mean-

ing in postholocaust art, an end stage of even conceiving the possibility
43
of meaning. Endgame, he argues, reduces philosophy and art to

‘cultural trash’ (241) and thus:
[I]nterpretation of Endgame cannot pursue the chimerical aim of

expressing the play’s meaning in a form mediated by philosophy.
Understanding it can mean only understanding its unintelligibility,
concretely reconstructing the meaning that it has no meaning. (243)
Nostalgia and narrative: Melancholia

Adorno’s essay is a brilliant diagnosis of the condition of Beckett’s
world but he does, I think, tend to override the strength, the stubborn
strength, of the despair in the play. This is a play of massive longing
for an impossible past, of massive nostalgia for what has been. These
characters live in a corpsed world of compromised ethics and ago-
nized relationships and all look back—impossibly—to what has been
lost. More precisely, the past, as we see in especially Hamm’s central
narrative, is a time, a place, where significant ethical action could
have been enacted (this conditional tense is crucial) but was not. I will
not reduce Beckett’s favorite play to an easy moral lesson but surely
one of the things Hamm’s repeated and habitual return to the past
suggests is that to live in regret, in nostalgia without consolation, is
the purest form of despair. And despair, which for Beckett still carries
the quasi-theological idea of distance and separation from meaning,
contradicts Adorno’s sense of the utter senselessness of the play. For
despair to be present means that something—the past, history—still
carries the resonance, the trace, if only a spectral trace, of value. We
need in other words to understand how in Endgame the recognition
of the loss of meaning becomes meaningful in itself and may in part
be what the play is about. Rather than presenting a play of utter
negation, Beckett examines how humankind deals with what we may
call the residue of meaning, the traces of loss that can never be eradi-
cated or negated.
Beckett weaves a sense of what I am calling nostalgia without con-
solation throughout the play. In an early moment, Nagg and Nell
emerge from their rubbish bins and engage in a hideous, and quite
hilarious, parody of normal companionship:
Nell: What is it, my pet? Time for love?

Nagg: Were you asleep?
44
Nell: Oh no!
Nagg: Kiss me.
Nell: We can’t.
Nagg: Try.
Nell: Why this farce, day after day?
Nagg: I’ve lost me tooth.
Nell: When?
Nagg: I had it yesterday.
Nell: (elegiac) Ah yesterday! (101)
Beckett’s stage direction (‘elegiac’) is crucial. In its poetic form the

elegy laments the loss of somebody (usually a young man) and typi-
cally—as in Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ or Shelley’s ‘Adonais’—moves toward
a moment of consolation where the poet successfully works through
that loss and comes to some form of acceptance. This scene of con-
solation is what Sigmund Freud would characterize as the moment
of ‘successful mourning’. Mourning’s success, as Freud puts it in his
seminal essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, is predicated on and pre-
dicted by the ability of the mourner to contain the traumatic loss
within a coherent narrative: the mourner must be able to understand
loss as such and contain that loss, digest it, metabolize it, and move
on.25 Mourning, in other words, allows the subject to place loss into
a coherent temporal structure where it is safely distanced. Freud pos-
ited that unsuccessful mourning, what he termed melancholia, is the
inability to mourn, the inability to separate oneself from the loss,
from the past: the melancholic thus is continually haunted by loss,
by history. In some crucial ways, and this idea plays out centrally in
Endgame, Beckett’s main theme is always melancholia.
Beckett signals an awareness of how melancholia pervades the
world of Endgame by continually foregrounding his characters’ pecu-
liar relation to temporality, to time. Nagg and Nell are deeply nostalgic
for this ‘yesterday’ (they recall with fondness, for instance, the moment
when they lost their ‘shanks’ in the Sedan) and continually revisit,
as teller or listener, the past through habitually shared stories and
(bad) jokes. Their lives now are almost literally nothing compared
to what has been.
And certainly Hamm’s central narrative, the keystone of the
play, is a study in both nostalgia and melancholy, a return to a past
which continually haunts the present moment. Hamm’s narrative is
45
a perfect representation of the peculiar nature of Beckettian melan-

cholia: here we have a subject haunted not simply by the past, but by
a possible past, the memory of which he seems in turn consciously to
manipulate and alter at whim. In Hamm’s narrative thus we have a
demonstration of a kind of self-inflicted melancholia: and it is pre-
cisely the nature of this masochistic act of story-telling that is at the
ethical heart of this play.
It is clear from the context of Hamm’s narrative—he variously
calls it his ‘chronicle’ (134) or the ‘audition’ (126)—that he compels
his father and Clov to listen to a story he has told many times before.
This repetition is important as is the fact that Hamm needs an
audience. If, as the common Beckettian trope would have it, one
exists only insofar as one is seen, Hamm seems to require his past to
be witnessed in order for it to have been; like Coleridge’s Ancient
Mariner, condemned to repeat his story of crime and punishment,
Hamm in some senses has become his narrative: telling it confirms
his existence. And the fact that it is this particular narrative to which
Hamm compulsively returns indicates that there is something in the
story that Hamm is trying to comprehend, to work through. Hamm’s
compulsion to repeat, reenact, and rehearse his continual haunting
by history indicates a need to master some aspect of his history, a
need to lay to rest something in the past that still troubles him.
But what is Hamm’s story about? What is this thing requiring
mastery? As perhaps we expect, nothing is immediately certain here.
The story, the details, and perhaps even the main subject of which
possibly are being fabricated by Hamm, concerns a moment in his
past where he had the means and power to render real aid to someone.
It is thus a recalling of an instance of ethical action. More precisely,
the story of a supplicant asking for help for himself and his child is
one demonstrating a time when ethical action could possibly have
occurred: it takes place before the cataclysm that has corpsed this
world. Hamm controls all the details of the story—giving minute
details of weather conditions and indicating precisely what kind of
match he used to light his pipe—just as he demonstrates his ability to
control the lives of the beggar and the child:
Gradually I cooled down, sufficiently at least to ask him how long

he had taken on the way. Three whole days. Good. In what condi-
tion he had left the child. Deep in sleep. But deep in what sleep,
46
deep in what sleep already? Well, to make it short I finally offered

to take him into my service. He had touched a chord. And then
I imagined already that I wasn’t much longer for this world. Well?
Here if you were careful you might die a nice natural death, in
peace and comfort. Well? In the end he asked me would I consent
to take in the child as well—if he were still alive. It was the moment
I was waiting for. Would I consent to take in the child . . . (130)
Of course Hamm’s story is a rather terrifying demonstration of

power. He seems to have been anticipating his ability to be magnani-
mous to the beggar, relishing the opportunity to demonstrate his
ability to care for the child—who may perhaps have been Clov—where
the real father could not. I need to be very clear about this moment:
I am not suggesting that Hamm himself is acting ethically here but
that, to repeat, his story takes place in a time where some ethical action
could have taken place. Hamm’s continual return to this moment in
the past is, on one hand, a nostalgic return to potency. On the other, as
we will see, it is a performance of self-criticism, even self-loathing.
Because it is clear as the play continues to unfold that Hamm’s
return to this story is a kind of defense: it is as if he tells the story to
suggest that he did once act, however selfishly, to save another. Hamm
admits, in perhaps the key ethical moment of the play, to having been
absent to his own life. Clov’s response to Hamm’s self-pity is telling:
Hamm: I was never there. Clov!

Clov: What is it?
Hamm: I was never there.
Clov: Lucky for you.
Hamm: Absent, always. It all happened without me. I don’t know
what’s happened. Do you know what’s happened? Clov!
Clov: Do you want me to look at this mudheap, yes or no?
Hamm: Answer me first.
Clov: What?
Hamm: Do you know what’s happened?
Clov: When? Where?
Hamm: When! What’s happened? Use your head, can’t you! What
has happened?
Clov: What for Christ’s sake does it matter?
Hamm: I don’t know.
47
Clov: When old Mother Pegg asked you for oil for her lamp
and you told her to get out to hell, you knew what was
happening then, no? You know what she died of, Mother
Pegg? Of darkness.
Hamm: I hadn’t any.
Clov: Yes, you had. (145–46)
Mother Pegg provides the necessary ethical symmetry here. Hamm

can claim, does claim repeatedly, to have helped the beggar and his
son, but he had the means to help many more, as Clov insistently
reminds him. Mother Pegg, who is only mentioned twice in the play,
is the primary emblem of the dead past which continually haunts
Hamm. She becomes the symptom of his melancholy, becomes the
reason for his sense of ethical failure: ‘All those I might have helped.
Helped! Saved. Saved! The place was crawling with them!’ (141).
Beckett signals Hamm’s continual sense of the loss of this moment,
the loss of a time when he could have been present to his ethical
responsibilities, by having Hamm return again to the story of the
beggar and his child in his final monologue. This narrative, the frag-
ments of which Hamm desperately tries to shore against his ethical
ruins, signals his inability to escape the claims of history: ‘Moments
for nothing, now as always, time was never and time is over, reckoning
closed and story ended . . . If he could have his child with him . . .
It was the moment I was waiting for’ (153). The brutal realization
here, of course, is that time may be over, but time certainly was not
‘never’: Hamm did have time to act, did have the means to save, but did
not. And Hamm’s condition as melancholic gives the lie to his claim
that time is over: time may not be functioning here, now, as it once
did, but history—time past—is continually pressing upon him, con-
tinually claiming his agonized attention.
Repetition: Audience responsibility

And of course we need to interrogate further the idea, as Hamm
claims, that the story is over, that time has ended for this play. Because
it is clear that, like Waiting for Godot, Endgame is grounded on the
logic of repetition. Not only do characters habitually return to famil-
iar stories and jokes, seemingly unable to escape the claims of the
past, but they seem aware that they are in fact in a play with a
48
seemingly endless run. Indeed, one way to view the play is as a medi-
tation—admittedly a strange conception—on what we may call, after
Fredric Jameson, the prison-house of acting. Hamm and Clov are
intensely aware of their status as actors (they refer to auditions,
underplots, asides, and final soliloquies) and thus their state of being,
let us say, condemned to act.26 Crucially, we as audience members or
readers of the play are continually made aware that we give these
characters life that we bring them to life, every time we attend a per-
formance or open the text and read. When Clov turns his telescope
on the audience and says ‘I see . . . a multitude . . . in transports . . .
of joy’ (112), or when Hamm senses being looked at—‘All kinds of
fantasies! That I’m being watched!’ (142)—Beckett signals, I believe,
a sense of our participation and responsibility in this play. The audi-
ence in fact enacts the Berkeleyean dictum ‘to be is to be perceived’
by granting painful life to these pained characters. Like Vladimir and
Estragon, Hamm and Clov are not merely emblems of Heideggerian
‘thrown’ beings, but they stand as metaphors for the idea that human-
kind is condemned to act repeatedly in a play not necessarily of its
own choosing.
Thus, when Hamm expresses a desire for the end of things—
‘Enough, it’s time it ended’ (93)—he is not merely speaking of his life,
but of the play that he seems to know he is in. When Clov says ‘All
life long the same questions, the same answers’ (95), he is not only
referring to the habits of speech we all fall into, but to the fact that he
is condemned to speak lines written for him. When Clov asks ‘What
is there to keep me here?’ Hamm responds: ‘The dialogue’ (134) indi-
cating again that they are simply carrying out the predetermined plot
of a drama prescribed for them from elsewhere. Hamm expresses
what is surely a key line in the play—and a central theme in Beckett’s
work generally—when he says ‘If I can hold my peace, and sit quiet,
it will be all over with sound, and motion, all over and done with’
(142). Hamm’s agony is the inability to be silent, the inability to stop
speaking.
Free will?
And it is here that Endgame begins to sound very much like a medita-
tion on the concepts of free will and determination. The play’s central
metaphor, that we all are condemned to act out endlessly repeating
49
roles in a play from which we cannot escape, suggests the idea that
freedom, as such, is a complete illusion (Hamm’s repeated exhorta-
tion, ‘You’re on earth! There’s no cure for that!’ takes on added
meaning now). In this way Endgame can be read as a quasi-religious
examination of what we call the determined life, with Beckett the
playwright controlling his characters’ lives in ways some assume God
controls our own. Hamm’s central narrative, read in this light (as it
crucially must) now takes on an added desperation. Hamm is not
only tacitly admitting to a kind of ethical failure, but in his almost
maniacal manipulation of details—his threat to bring ‘other charac-
ters’ (130) into the story—he looks like he is attempting to assert a
creative, existential autonomy: in the face of realizing that he is con-
demned to repeat his actions endlessly, Hamm tries to determine his
own life by controlling the details of its history, an obviously futile
gesture.
Endgame thus presents an uncompromisingly complex view of the
human condemned to act roles seemingly not of their choosing but at
some level precisely of their devising. Hamm is here, in this existential
now, both because he is an actor in a play—a traditional trope,
indeed—and because his actions, specifically with regard to Mother
Pegg, have contributed to his present agonized ethical reality. ‘There
is no escape from yesterday’, Beckett writes in Proust,
because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us . . .

Deformation has taken place. Yesterday is not a milestone that
has passed, but a daystone on the beaten track of the years, and
irremediably part of us, within us, heavy and dangerous. We are
not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are other, no lon-
ger what were before the calamity of yesterday. (512)
Beckett’s words here are, of course, a perfect diagnosis of the subject

as irremediably melancholic, bound to a past which cannot be shaken,
continually feeling the claims of history even as he attempts in some
manner to shape that history. We shall see, in our examination of
Krapp’s Last Tape, Happy Days, Play, and Not I how Beckett compli-
cates his view of the melancholic subject as one who not only feels
the claims of history but, strangely, becomes history by transforming
into its embodied archive. In this process, one that begins I believe in
Endgame’s representation of Hamm who, like the Ancient Mariner,
50
has become his narrative, his history, we will see Beckett unfolding
his sense that history makes us ‘other, no longer what we were’. Ulti-
mately these late plays explore how the past deforms us and transforms
us to the point where we become utterly alienated from our pasts,
from time and space and, crucially, our own bodies.
51
CHAPTER 3
KRAPP’S LAST TAPE,

HAPPY DAYS, PLAY, NOT I
Les vrai paradis sont les paradis qu’on a perdu.

—Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu
In this chapter I propose to explore four plays each of which contrib-

utes to a series of connected themes. Krapp’s Last Tape, Happy Days,
Play, and Not I are concerned with what I call the ‘claims of history’;
each play examines various stages of acknowledged or unacknowl-
edged crises, crises arising precisely as characters realize the way in
which they are subject to and affected by actions that have occurred
in the past. These plays also continue the trajectory of Waiting for
Godot and Endgame by progressively diminishing the physical body:
while Krapp may have a fully integrated body, the play is ultimately
concerned with the claims made by a dis-embodied voice; Happy
Days famously buries its lead character in earth up to her waist in the
first act and to her neck in the second; Play sees each of three char-
acters interred in urns; and Not I, the locus classicus of theatrical
bodily reduction, features only a mouth, spewing a fragmented nar-
rative of trauma.
As we examine the plays spanning the years 1958 to 1972, we notice
Beckett’s relentless interest in finding the appropriate form for his
ideas. What is crucial here is the way in which obsessively consistent
themes (history, loss, melancholia) are explored in obsessively experi-
mental forms: no play looks the same in Beckett’s body of work,
however much the themes remain obstinately familiar. As we explore
these works we should keep in mind the central relation between
form and content: Why does Beckett reduce the body’s mobility and
52
KRAPP’S LAST TAPE, HAPPY DAYS, PLAY, NOT I
integrity over the course of these plays? What exactly is it about the
body that requires its reduction? Finally, we need to try to come to
some understanding of what exactly Beckett has produced here
because these ‘plays’ are surely not plays in any conventional sense.
Waiting for Godot did certainly shake the foundations of modern
drama, and if we are still trying to come to interpretive grips with its
claims, how are we to go about understanding a play like Not I?
KRAPP’S LAST TAPE

Context: Technology
In some ways Krapp’s Last Tape does not belong in a book entitled
A Guide for the Perplexed. This short play, written in 1958, is perhaps
Beckett’s most accessible, one might even say, easy, play. However, an
inclusion of the work here is crucial because of the interpretive light
it casts on previous and future plays. Krapp’s Last Tape distills the
major thematic elements of past work into a form that may seem, for
Beckett, oddly sentimental. On a basic level the play is about love,
lost love, and the regrets and debts such a loss incurs. As Krapp looks
back—precisely, listens back—on his past, confronting and simulta-
neously disavowing his deliberate denial of happiness, we realize that
Beckett once again is analyzing the relation of the subject to history
and memory. And if in Endgame this exploration takes on the veneer
of philosophy (with its issues of free will and determinism), here in
Krapp’s Last Tape Beckett humanizes his interest in the melancholic
subject by staging issues familiar to anyone who has ever been in love.
Indeed, Beckett realized this play would perhaps end up humanizing
the playwright himself: ‘People will say: good gracious, there is blood
circulating in the man’s veins after all, one would never have believed
it; he must be getting old’ (quoted in Knowlson: 399).
If Krapp’s Last Tape has a fairly conventional theme—the regret
over past action—the method by which Beckett explores his ideas
strike us, even now, as remarkable. Beckett had in the late 1950s
become interested in new technological developments, specifically
in sound recording. The tape recorder, a model of which he saw in
operation in the BBC studios just the month prior to writing Krapp’s
Last Tape, provides the means by which Beckett can confront the
present Krapp with past versions of himself: the tape recorder thus
53
serves to pluralize, disembody, and fracture the subject.1 Indeed the

mechanical reproductive capabilities of the machine directly force
Krapp to realize that his prior selves are in some profound ways
absolutely discontinuous with his present self. When, for instance,
Krapp consults the ledger, which serves as an index of themes
covered on the tapes, he reads ‘memorable equinox’ (223); the sixty-
nine-year-old Krapp clearly has no memory of the equinox. Nor can
he remember the meaning of ‘viduity’ (225), a word his thirty-nine-
year-old self uses rather pretentiously. The fact that the present
Krapp must consult a dictionary to discover the meaning of the word
demonstrates the temporal and psychological gulf separating the
various elements of the self.
Thus is Beckett able, via the machine, to make concrete the concept
of memory. The tape has captured the past, has rendered it seemingly
indisputably there, in a way that makes a denial of its claims pain-
fully difficult. But, of course, as Krapp’s youthful performances in
the past indicate, even these concrete manifestations of memory, per-
haps especially these manifestations, are carefully constructed. The
various versions of Krapp have (and are) carefully modulating their
performances. And at some crucial level the play is making a central
claim: all memory, all attempts to capture the present moment, tech-
nologically or merely mentally, are always already fabrications. The
tape recorder simply is an objective correlative of the idea that mem-
ory, all memory, is constructed by the subject and is subject in its turn
to interpretation, acceptance, or disavowal.
What Beckett’s play examines in excruciating fashion is the brutal
truth that we are in some ways indebted, perhaps masochistically
enslaved, to memories which we have deliberately constructed. In
‘Truth and Falsity in Their Extra-Moral Sense’, philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche argues that the concept of truth—be it the idea of God, of
justice, of meaning—is not some eternal, supratemporal concept, but
one that we created and have subsequently attributed to sources
external to us, forgetting our responsibility for the idea. Nietzsche
famously writes: ‘truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that
they are illusions’ (92).2 Beckett ruthlessly explores what happens to
an individual when the constructedness of memory, the fabricated
archive of memory—the ‘truth’—is revealed. What, he asks, is the
subject to do when the truth of his behavior is revealed? What is the
subject to do when he realizes precisely his responsibility for his pres-
ent state of despair and unhappiness?
54
The melancholy archive

Perhaps one way of understanding what Krapp has created with his
tape recorder—a device to which he is clearly, if painfully, addicted—
is to relate his memory-work to the concept of the archive. The
archive, as Derrida reminds us in Archive Fever, is not only, or even
primarily, a way of preserving history. The archive, he suggests, while
working ostensibly to allow access to the past, and thus allow the past
in a sense to speak—as it literally does in Krapp’s Last Tape—is
always oriented to the future. For Derrida, ‘the question of the archive
it not . . . a question of the past . . . It is a question of the future, the
question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise
and of a responsibility for tomorrow’ (36). Archives—libraries, muse-
ums, or even monuments—are oriented to the future in the sense that
they respond to what will be a need for the past. This need to under-
stand what happened in the past is, as Derrida makes clear, always
already to come: the archive’s full meaning is always a future one.
And Derrida’s notion that the archive in some senses creates
and preserves the past just as it creates the future (or a concept of
futurity) makes sense of the first stage direction in the play: ‘A late
evening in the future’ (221). Beckett had to set the play in the future
for logical reasons: Krapp has been creating this tape recording once
a year (on his birthday) for around forty years or so; the tape recorder
was a recent invention in 1958 and so, for the sake of a kind of real-
ism, the play is set in the future. But I think we should keep this stage
direction in mind for thematic reasons as well. The central motif of
the play—a later self looking back on what was with regret—is one
fully dependent on the idea of futurity: Krapp at thirty-nine has pre-
pared the ground for a future audience with himself.
Future trauma
Beckett is here indicating a central understanding of the mechanism
not only of memory but of trauma. Because what is traumatic is never
fully recognized as such at the time of its occurrence. In Unclaimed
Experience trauma theorist Cathy Caruth draws on Freud’s concept
of Nachtraglichkeit, or deferred action, and argues that trauma can
only be understood retrospectively:
[T]rauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in

an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated
55
nature—the way it was precisely not known in the first instance—

returns to haunt the survivor later on. (4)
Trauma thus is a concept, like the archive, oriented completely to

the future. This night is, therefore, the future moment of realization
that the thirty-nine-year-old Krapp can never know. This is the future
moment of loss only perceivable by the present self who inherits
the pain created unknowingly by the past self, the past self who now
seems absolutely Other. As Derrida might argue, the thirty-nine-
year-old Krapp has created an archive that has in its turn elicited a
traumatic response in the future self.
Because it is clear that the moments captured in ‘Box three . . .
spool . . . five’ (222) are resonant ones. Here the thirty-nine-year-old
Krapp details a year of ‘profound gloom and indigence’ (226) marked
only by two singular occurrences. The first is an epiphany concerning
Krapp’s career as a writer:
The vision at last. This I fancy is what I have chiefly to record

this evening, against the day when my work will be done and
perhaps no place left in memory, warm or cold, for the miracle
that . . . [hesitates]. . . for the fire that set it alight. What I suddenly
saw then was this, that the belief I had been going on all my life,
namely . . . (226)
Krapp interrupts this narrative at the moment before revealing to us

what his epiphany has been, but we sense from a fragmented sentence
soon after that it has something to do with discovering his proper
subject matter: ‘clear to me at last that the dark I have always strug-
gled to keep under is in reality my most—’ (226).3 The elderly Krapp
here curses, signaling perhaps an acknowledgment that his ‘work’—
which seems to have sold only ‘seventeen copies’ (228)—has been an
abject failure.
Krapp fast-forwards the tape and comes upon another narrative.
Here is the central narrative in the play, the moment where the thirty-
nine-year-old Krapp recalls a moment where a relationship, while
seemingly on the verge of dissolution, still retains the possibility of
happiness. Krapp and a woman are on the water in a small boat:
She lay stretched out on the floorboards with her hands under her
head and her eyes closed. Sun blazing down, bit of a breeze, water
56
nice and lively. I noticed a scratch on her thigh and asked her how
she came by it. Picking gooseberries she said. I said again I thought
it was hopeless and no good going on and she agreed, without
opening her eyes. [Pause.] I asked her to look at me and after a few
moments—[pause]—after a few moments she did, but the eyes just
slits, because of the glare. I bent over her to get them in the shadow
and they opened. [Pause. Low.] Let me in. [Pause.] We drifted in
among the flags and stuck. The way they went down, sighing,
before the stem! [Pause.] I lay down across her with my face in her
breasts and hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under
us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side
to side. (227)
When in the present Krapp speaks he attempts repeatedly to

disavow the resonance of this memory, but the disavowal—which
becomes a central structure in Not I—is clearly ineffective signaling
as it does a desire precisely to return again to that moment of lost
happiness: ‘Just been listening to that stupid bastard I took myself
for thirty years ago, hard to believe I was ever as bad as that. Thank
God that’s all done with anyway. [Pause.] The eyes she had!’ (228).
A few minutes later, however, he remembers past memories of happi-
ness, including a Christmas with his dog:
Be again in the dingle on a Christmas Eve, gathering holly, the

red-berried. [Pause.] Be again on Croghan on a Sunday morning,
in the haze, with the bitch, stop and listen to the bells. [Pause.]
And so on. Be again, be again. [Pause.] All that old misery.
[Pause.] Once wasn’t enough for you. [Pause.] Lie down across
her. (229)
Krapp’s repeated ‘be again’ and the final ‘lie down across her’ indi-
cate why he returns so often to this archive of memory: memory
allows him to be again, to exist at a time where the future contained
the possibility, if not of love—which his narrative indicates he
rejects—but of success at work.4 The elderly Krapp at sixty-nine
has neither success at work nor love (the two things, incidentally,
Freud said were crucial for happiness). All Krapp has is the ghost
archive of himself endlessly and forever rejecting the possibility
of happiness. The final moment of the play, surely one of the most
poignant in Beckett, sees the elderly Krapp listening to himself
57
disavowing happiness in favor of the creative ‘fire’ we know will fail

fully to ignite:
Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be

uninhabited.
[Pause.]
Here I end this reel. Box—[Pause.]—three, spool—[Pause.]—five.
[Pause.] Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance
of happiness. But I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in
me now. No I wouldn’t want them back.
[Krapp motionless staring before him. The tape runs on in silence.]
(229–30)
This final stage direction—‘The tape runs on in silence’—is crucial.

The archive has become silent but its potential for activation, like the
potential for all memory to return, remains. Krapp’s taped response
to his past self—‘stupid bastard’—disavows a connection to the past
(thus creating a curious disavowal of a disavowal!) and may in fact be
the ‘last’ tape of the play’s title. But we surely must realize that the
tape that still runs silently is ultimately the last tape in the sense that
it contains what are the traces of the final moments of meaningful
resonance in his life. The intervening years, ones the audience is asked
to imagine, have only seen the decline from the younger Krapp’s per-
ceived potential. This last tape therefore is one to which we can
imagine Krapp will continue to return precisely because it marks the
boundary between a life of meaning and one meaningful only in its
despair.
HAPPY DAYS
The image (1)
Krapp’s Last Tape, like Endgame and especially Waiting for Godot,
ends with a still, almost painterly tableau: ‘Krapp motionless staring
before him’. Indeed, one may argue that Beckett will be searching
for the ideal image throughout his career as a dramatist, the image
that represents the pure distillation of emotion and captures what
Heidegger would call a moment of Being. Happy Days, though fea-
turing the most garrulous character in Beckett, is, in my mind, the
first play dominated by the iconic Beckettian image: Winnie up to her
waist, and then neck, in the earth. Part of what the audience of later
58
Beckett is asked to do is interpret these images—people in urns (Play),

a Mouth (Not I), four robed figures (Quad)—as visual metaphors. We
may not be able logically to understand why Winnie is embedded—
encrypted—in earth but we can, indeed will, attempt to interpret the
image metaphorically, asking ourselves, like Winnie’s two touristy
visitors, ‘What does it mean? What’s it meant to mean?’ (294).
And yet part of the intellectual frisson produced by watching later
Beckett arises when what appears to be an allegorical image—Winnie
in earth as metaphor for the subject trapped by the debris and detri-
tus of modern culture; Winnie as metaphor for the subject gradually
entombed by the claims of history—is given a ‘realistic’ explanation
in the play, or is simply acknowledged as part of the logic of the
world the character inhabits. Winnie, for instance, acknowledges a
time when she was ‘not yet caught’ (291) in earth, thereby making it
hard for the audience simply to read her as metaphor: she really is
trapped and thus we are justified in asking, with no pun intended,
what on earth can it mean when allegory collides with a bizarre kind
of realism?
THE GERMAN LETTER: UNWORDING THE WORD

One way of approaching the increasing strangeness of Beckett’s later
works is to keep in mind his stated goal to get past language itself.
In 1937 Beckett wrote his important German Letter. Here he spoke
of the need of the modern writer to find the means to move past con-
ventional means of communication:
It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for

me to write in an official English. And more and more my own
language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order
to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it . . . . To bore one
hole after another in it [language], until what lurks behind it—be
it something or nothing—begins to seep through; I cannot imag-
ine a higher goal for a writer today. (172)
Of course, Beckett still is representing human experience and even

in a play like Quad (1982) which has no dialogue at all, there are
‘languages’ being used (sound and image). Beckett’s restless search
for the means to put an end to language and to find what he terms the
59
‘unfathomable abysses of silence’ (172) means that his work will put
increasing interpretive demands on his audience.
We must now become interpreters not only of spoken language but
of the attempt—in the drama through the dominance of the visual
image, the image inevitably and crucially of the immobilized or frag-
mented body—to transcend, perhaps even to put an end, to that
language. The image—of Winnie in earth, of Winnie holding aloft
a flaming parasol—is perhaps all we need, all we can expect here.
Beckett’s work from Happy Days onward asks his audience to listen
attentively to his characters’ narratives, but also to watch carefully
for the emergence of the iconic image, the image, as we will see, that
inevitably is one of the body in some compromised position.
Marriage and ideology

Happy Days was written in English in 1961. As Hugh Kenner
suggests, it is an eminently English play in its representation of the
(perhaps) stereotypical trait of the stiff upper lip.5 Certainly Winnie’s
almost manic drive to remain happy, to discover that this too will
have been another ‘happy day’, seems a pitch-perfect parody of the
English self-conscious will to persevere in the face of quite obvious
hardship.6 And indeed, the situation of Winnie and Willie is yet
another Beckettian moment of self-conscious extremity: trapped on
an expanse of ‘scorched grass’ (275), Winnie and Willie seem (like
Hamm, Clov, Nagg, and Nell before) to be the last inhabitants of a
planet upon which some calamity has been visited.7 Certainly Winnie
is trapped not only physically but, like Hamm, who also is immobi-
lized, she is condemned to play a central role in a drama beyond her
control. The bell which wakes her at the beginning of the play (and
periodically prevents her from nodding off) has been interpreted as a
prompter’s bell urging Winnie to act. Winnie knows that her day—
her performance of normality—will end in the perfectly timed singing
of a song; when she recalls her two visitors she clearly evokes her
position as actor in a play, with her visitors acting as the audience’s
surrogates: ‘What’s she doing . . . What does it mean?. . .What’s it
meant to mean?’ (294). She, like the majority of Beckettian protago-
nists, has a simultaneous need for and horror of being watched: in
Winnie’s case, she even seems aware of the waxing and waning atten-
tion of the audience: ‘Strange feeling . . . strange feeling that someone
is looking at me. I am clear, then dim, then gone, then dim again, then
60
clear again, and so on, back and forth, in and out of someone’s eye.
Strange? No, here all is strange’ (293).
At one level thus Winnie’s physical predicament is a way of con-
cretizing the notion of entrapment which occurs as roles, perhaps not
of our choosing, are thrust upon us. And by now we are familiar with
the Beckettian trope of actor/character as representative of a despair-
ing existential predicament. Winnie becomes the clearest example
in Beckett of what we can call the cruelty of the gaze, the way the
audience—as in Endgame—is in a sense responsible for keeping the
actress/character in her position. After all, if there were no audience,
Winnie would not exist, as she well knows.
Happy Days, however, strikes me as acknowledging not only a
painful kind of metatheatrical self-consciousness, but as offering
a commentary on other forms of entrapment, other forms of cultural
and ideological pressure that restrain and shape (Beckett might use
the word ‘deform’) the modern subject. Beckett is here exploring and
perhaps critiquing the way humankind invests itself in cultural struc-
tures and supports—literature, marriage, conceptions of time and
history, material products (Winnie’s ‘things’)—all of which inevita-
bly fail. Happy Days can thus be read as examining the terminal point
of Western culture, the moment of the collapse of all supporting
beliefs and structures; in so doing the play exposes how fragile (and
how facile) these sustaining beliefs really are.
And yet, as we by now perhaps anticipate, Winnie persists, becomes
in fact the embodiment of persistence. Despite or because of her
near total immobility and her acute yet inevitably disavowed sense of
despair, she, like the unnamable, must and will go on. This is to say
that Beckett takes his characters (and his readers) to a place of
extremes yet does not abandon them utterly: there is something that
remains after the end. Our task is to learn to identify those remains
that may serve, negatively perhaps, to sustain us in the ‘after space’ of
being. Beckett’s work, as Alain Badiou reminds us, here becomes
a lesson in ‘measure, exactitude, and courage’ (40).8
Things remain
It is clear from the outset that Happy Days functions as a parody
(or is an uncanny representation) of marriage. Winnie plays the gar-
rulous wife, Willie the taciturn, bored, and at the end of the play
possibly homicidal husband. This is a marriage of long standing
61
where each partner’s actions are dictated by habit and compulsion.

At some level the play examines how identities, especially that of
Winnie, are absorbed by, and subsumed under, the claims of a mar-
riage which supersedes the individual. The trap Winnie is in could
easily—perhaps too easily—be read as the trap of marriage.
But Beckett’s examination of Winnie is far more complex. She, as
her repeated recourse to lines of great poetry indicates, is one who
seems to require the thoughts of others—she quotes from Shakespeare,
Milton, Gray, and Yeats among others—to make clear her own expe-
rience.9 Winnie seems unable to articulate, perhaps even to understand,
her present situation except via half-remembered lines of poetry.
These lines, always in danger of becoming emptied of resonance
through habitual use, stand, moreover, in stark contrast to the empti-
ness of the present moment. These quotations evoke a time when
culture meant something, when a moral universe evoked in, say,
Milton’s Paradise Lost, reflected a working interpretation of experi-
ence. We are here at the end of human culture, where concepts such
as good and evil—or the conception of love evoked in Romeo and
Juliet—seem patently absurd: Winnie’s use of these ‘wonderful lines’
only serves to highlight the harsh reality of this terminal point.
If the great works of literature are shown to be bankrupt in this
waste land, the material products of this culture—mirrors, lipstick,
toothbrushes, parasols—similarly fail to sustain and protect. As
Winnie says ‘things have their life . . . things have a life’ (302), and she
is shown, especially in the first act, to put her faith, like all good con-
sumers, in things, the life of things, which perhaps serve to distract
her from her present reality. In the second act, however, when she
is buried to her neck and thus denied access to her bag—‘There is
of course the bag. There will always be the bag’ (286)—Winnie’s com-
fort rapidly and radically declines. And of course one of the iconic
images of the play—Winnie holding up a burning parasol—is the
perfect moment of betrayal by the material: the parasol fails to pro-
vide protection from the relentless sun in a way that reminds us that
in the end, all things—all products—eventually fall into dissolution.
The clear progression in the play, earth to the waist and then
neck, leads Winnie to a simultaneous understanding that all things—
material objects, prayers, words—‘Words fail, there are times when
even they fail’ (284)—will not sustain her in the present moment. But
Winnie, despite the occasional moment when ‘sorrow keeps breaking
in’ (289), works assiduously to deny what she consciously knows.
62
When all things fail, Winnie insists that there is a remainder, something
left to sustain her: ‘There always remains something. Of everything’
(300). This denial begins to take on added desperation after we and
Winnie consciously realize that her day, this ‘heavenly day’ (275), is
an endlessly repeating one. Things may occur during the course of
the day but because they are repetitions of what has already occurred
(and will occur again) nothing in itself means much. After her para-
sol bursts into flame Winnie offers this diagnosis of her situation:
Yes, something seems to have occurred, something has seemed to

occur, and nothing has occurred, nothing at all . . . The sunshade
will be there again tomorrow, beside me on this mound, to help me
through the day. I take up this little glass, I shiver it on a stone—
I throw it away—it will be in the bag again tomorrow, without a
scratch, to help me through the day. No, one can do nothing. (292)
In this space of repetition where time has ceased to function (we

recall Hamm’s similar complaint, ‘Time was never and time is over’)
nothing can be done to effect meaning. Time, what Winnie refers to
as ‘the old style’, has ceased, and Winnie’s insistence that things
remain begins to sound increasingly despairing. Because it is clear
that we are only ever in the space of remains here in Happy Days: the
remains, the graveyard, of marriage, of culture, of time itself.
Being ‘after’
Happy Days therefore explores what it is like to exist in the space (we
really cannot call it a time) of the ‘after’: after culture’s collapse, after
humanity’s seeming disappearance. What, Beckett asks, persists in
the space of after? In some ways the answer can only be: the human
subject, as repository and archive of the vanished past; the human
subject as witness to the vanishing; the human subject as witness and
therefore creator of this space of after. Despite the eradication of
culture, of time, the memory of culture and time persists in the
human subject: ‘That’s right, Willie, look at me. Feast your old eyes,
Willie. Does anything remain? Any remains? No?’ (306). But of
course Winnie does—and will forever—remain: she becomes the
remains of the culture just as she is remaindered by time itself.
It becomes possible thus to read the immobilized body in Happy
Days (and forward to Play and Not I) as the precise image of the
63
body-as-archive: we move forward from Krapp’s Last Tape, where

there is an externalizing of the archive of memory (in the material
object of the tape recorder), to an interiorized yet stubbornly mate-
rial, phenomenally embodied, archive. Derrida suggests that the
archive is a site of commencement and commandment: archives
authoritatively mark off the beginnings of things (civilizations, cul-
tures) just as they work in a sense to command and direct an
understanding of the future. Beckett’s body-as-archive functions not
as a site of commencement but as a sign of the end, a repository of
remains that are witnessed by few, if any, in a time that cannot really
be understood as such.
But it is essential to realize that the body, its parts, never does com-
pletely fade from these plays. Winnie is in a curious position at the
end of Happy Days: buried to the neck, she perhaps will be grateful
for the repeating structure of the play that will see her partially
restored to mobility. A curious but still a corporeal position: she
still remains and becomes the compromised embodiment, the crypt,
of an extinct culture. And the iconic images given to us by this play—
Winnie encrypted to her waist; Winnie encrypted to her neck—are
precisely the ones that concretize and make identifiable the idea of
what we now can call archival persistence.
PLAY
Allegory?
Like Happy Days, Play (written in 1962–63) is a work dominated by
a singular, decidedly odd image: ‘three identical grey urns . . . From
each a head protrudes’ (355). In my reading of Happy Days, I suggested
we see Winnie as a repository of the defunct remains of human culture:
she functions as a kind of archive of the end (of things). In a sense
something similar occurs in Play. The three characters, W1, W2, M,
are the bodily repositories and archives of a very personal, rather
tawdry, history. Moreover, and quite obviously, they have become
a kind of waste, the remains or despairing by-product of this history,
endlessly condemned to recycle the same narrative of desire and
betrayal.
One of the many puzzling aspects of the play (even its title pres-
ents problems) arises when we try to determine where and when we
are here. We have taken an obvious step forward in terms of leaving
64
any shreds of realism behind. Given the urns, which look ominously
funereal—clearly the characters are dead—and the general condition
of the speaker’s faces, ‘so lost to age and aspect as to seem almost part
of urns’(355), we are tempted to think that we are witnessing a kind
of afterlife, some vaguely defined posthumous—perhaps even post-
human—existence. It is hard, as is always the case in Beckett, to state
anything definitively, but the presence and function of the interrogat-
ing light, the ‘unique inquisitor’ (367), which compels the characters
to speak when it shines on them, does initially lend a sense that these
characters are being punished in a kind of Hell.
Such a reading of the play—and it is precisely Hugh Kenner’s, who
sees Play as Beckett’s version of a ‘Protestant Hell’ (153)—strikes
me as raising more problems than it solves. To see a Hell here, a
Purgatory, or a Limbo, is in some sense to provide a theological,
even ethical, dimension to this world which is at odds with the decid-
edly antitheological, certainly antireligious, sensibility and tenor of
Beckett’s work. We are at best in a post-theological world in Beckett,
at worst a world that has never been graced by the presence of a
God, benevolent or otherwise. To see Play as a modern or postmod-
ern version of Dante’s Inferno, for instance—and it is certainly a
temptation—tends to stabilize the meaning of the drama in ways
Beckett’s work largely resists. Beckett’s world is not one that easily
accommodates the idea of externalized ethical forces. The idea that
something ‘out there’—God, for instance—works to pass judgment
on Beckett’s characters seems patently absurd when we begin to real-
ize the extent to which Beckett’s major interest is in the way our own
past actions are what, if anything, pass judgment on the present
moment.
The allegorical real

If then the play is not an exploration of Hell or Purgatory, and the
inquisitor—who functions in this ‘hellish half-light’—is not some
representation of infernal punishment, what then is it? Where then
are we? In some ways these questions are, and perhaps should remain,
unanswerable (but of course I will provide my own Freudian answer!).
Our reading of the mise-en-scene of the play—its location, setting,
lighting—like that of Happy Days, is made problematical precisely
by the way Beckett tempts us to allegory—it is about Hell; it is a con-
crete manifestation of collective guilt; it is, as I will explore below, an
65
examination of the Freudian compulsion to repeat—and then denies

that impulse. These characters know they are, again like Winnie,
really trapped here; they know there is a normal life elsewhere with
people ‘coming and going on the earth’ (357).
This place, in other words, is not simply an allegorical space.
Perhaps we can qualify this and say that Beckett’s spaces are allegori-
cal and real simultaneously.10 This understanding is a complex one
and places particular and peculiar interpretive pressures on us, but
it is a way of acknowledging how Beckett’s plays invite and resist
interpretation. Part of the experience of Beckett—and part of its
difficulty—is being forced simultaneously to maintain multiple and
perhaps contradictory reading positions. Play perfectly encapsulates
this particular interpretive difficulty, one that I believe forms an
important aspect of coming to an understanding of the work. I tend
to think that the end result of this complex and fluid reading position
is a quite simple, yet for Beckett crucial, idea: no human behavior
is reducible to a single interpretation. All art that explores the com-
plexity of human behavior will in its turn demand that we keep all
interpretive possibilities open.
The mise-en-scene of Play may cause us difficulty and the rapid-
fire delivery of the lines may initially challenge the viewer but it is
clear, or becomes so after the play repeats itself, that the actual story
being told here is tawdry, even banal.11 There is thus an uncanny
frisson produced here between the formal setting and the content in
Play, a frisson that to my mind is productive of a bizarre kind of
humor and again stretches our generic expectations: is this a comedy
being played out in urns? How am I to interpret such a bizarre idea?
In some sense, to answer my question briefly, Beckett is exploring, as
he did in Krapp’s Last Tape, what we can call the persistence of desire:
in this case, desire, the claims of which we all recognize, extends
beyond life into this pathetically reduced posthumous existence.
Despite the radical avant-garde strangeness of the work, Beckett
always does give us something recognizable—in this case, desire—
from which to orient our readings.
Play presents three perspectives on the same events surrounding
the relationship between a married man (M), his wife (W1), and lover
(W2). The events which have precipitated the crisis which has come
to the three (their urn burial) seem to have involved W1 confronting
the lover and her husband demanding they end the affair (notice,
66
however, that we are never explicitly told what actually happened to

them or why they died):
W1: I said to him, Give her up. I swore by all I held most sacred—
[Spot from W1 to W2.]
W2: One morning as I was sitting stitching by the open window
she burst in and flew at me. Give him up, she screamed, he’s
mine. Her photographs were kind to her. Seeing her now for
the first time full length in the flesh I understood why he pre-
ferred me. [Spot from W2 to M.]
M: We were not long together when she smelled the rat. Give up
that whore, she said, or I’ll cut my throat—[Hiccup] par-
don—so help me God. I knew she could have no proof. So
I told her I did not know what she was talking about. (356)
The three are evidently under the sway of the light and are being
compelled to tell this story. Like Hamm and Winnie, aware of
being watched, the three here are painfully aware that their story is
being forced out of them by the inquisitor. As the spot hits them the
character speaks only to go silent as soon as the light shifts to another
victim. Moreover, they are seemingly unaware of the other members
of the triangle. As W2 puts it so plaintively, indicating her sense of
utter isolation: ‘Are you listening to me? Is anyone listening to me?
Is anyone looking at me? Is anyone bothering about me at all?’ (362)
Freud (1): Repetition compulsion

One of the poignant aspects of Play is the terrible sense of permanence
the piece imparts. When the play ends and repeats itself—Beckett’s
stage directions here are brutally concise: ‘Repeat play’ (366)—we
know for certain that Beckett is again signaling a kind of endlessness
to this suffering.12 But if we choose, as I do, to reject the idea that we
are in Hell here, how can we understand this permanence? One way,
I suggest, is to see Play as exploring the idea of the permanent claims
of history—of the (oftentimes traumatized) narratives we tell—on
the subject. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud offers a theory
of repetition that sheds some light on the situation of these three
sufferers.13 In this essay Freud is attempting in part to come to an
understanding of why people seem compelled to repeat actions they
67
know consciously will harm them. Why, he asks, do patients trauma-

tized in the Great War continually dream about being back in that
scene of horror? The unconscious drive that places the victim back in
the moment of trauma troubles Freud because it disrupts his idea
that the dream functions as a fulfillment of wishes. And because no
one unconsciously or consciously wishes to return to the moment of
horror, Freud theorizes that trauma has disrupted the logic of the
dream function.
There must, therefore, be another explanation for the compulsion
to repeat, and Freud’s answer is complex and troubling. People repeat
actions and behavior at an unconscious level because they are trying
retroactively to reenact, interpret, and ultimately master the incident
which precipitated the initial trauma (we are reminded here of
Hamm’s main narrative). Trauma, as I mentioned in my discussion
of Krapp’s Last Tape, is not a comprehensible event at the initial
moment of its occurrence; it is not, as Cathy Caruth puts it ‘available
to consciousness’ (4). Trauma becomes knowable when it ‘imposes
itself, again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of
the survivor’ (4). In other words the survivor of trauma works her
way back to the initial scene of trauma in order to understand what
could not be initially understood.
Freud illustrates this desire to master the initial event through his
famous Fort-da anecdote. Freud, being called on to baby-sit his
grandson, observes the child’s odd reaction to his mother’s depar-
ture. The child throws a wooden reel (which has a piece of string
attached to it) out of his crib and utters the sound ‘o-o-o-o’ which
Freud interprets as the child’s attempt to say the German word fort
(‘gone’); as the child reels in the toy he utters the word da which
Freud interprets as German for ‘there’. For Freud the meaning of his
grandson’s behavior is clear: it works to conquer his anxiety caused
by his mother’s departure by symbolically—and playfully!—repeat-
ing her absence (fort) and subsequent return (da). Instead of being
in a position of passivity with regard to events, the child becomes
author and master of his own anxiety and its eventual dissipation:
‘At the outset he was in a passive situation—he was overpowered by
the experience; but, by repeating it, unpleasurable though it was, as a
game, he took an active part’ (285).
Play can be read as a concrete visual metaphor of the compulsion
to repeat. The light becomes an image of the unconscious as we wit-
ness what appears to be a collective repetition compulsion. Even if
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the three see themselves as isolated, the light—which now can be

read metaphorically as a ‘projection’ both of the initial traumatic
event and the desire to master that event—unites them in our eyes
at least. Beckett’s version of the repetition compulsion seems to be
suggesting that our actions—translated and transferred into end-
lessly repeated narrative (we may again be reminded of Coleridge’s
Ancient Mariner)—work not only to affect the individual but here
operate on a community of sufferers, not the least of whom, inciden-
tally, are the audience members, who absolutely require the repetition
of the play in order actually to understand the narrative: we are also
perhaps being indicted, as so often we are in Beckett, for our desire
to witness this suffering. Our desires and the effects of our desires
have consequences, eternal consequences.
In my reading of Play the speakers are attempting to, being forced
to, understand what has happened to them: the play becomes an
allegory—at one level at least—of the unconscious drive to repeat
in order to master events beyond one’s control. And curiously, if we
maintain our Freudian reading of the play we begin to see, perhaps
counterintuitively, that this interrogating light—if understood as
an image of the unconscious—becomes a curiously melancholy yet
compassionate force. Play, in other words, can be read as an extended
scene of compassion and sympathy if we read the light as the means
by which the sufferer is being asked to understand and move away
from—to work through—her pain.
However, what I call the terrible permanence of the play, the fact
that we know (even if the speakers do not) that they are condemned
endlessly to repeat this story, lends the drama a real sense of horror.
Freud holds out the hope that our repetitive actions will one day
be understood precisely as a symptom of a desire to master trauma
and that we will be able at some point to move beyond the trauma:
comprehension leads to the end of trauma. The endlessly repeating
form of Play, however, makes it clear that these characters will for-
ever be trapped in their posthumous narratives of desire, pain, and
loss. There is no moving past history for these characters because
the play they are trapped in will not allow them ever to know what
precipitated their present condition: the play never does tell us—
or them—what actually happened to them: did one kill the others
and then commit suicide? How did they die? Play thus becomes
the perfect representation of Caruth’s idea that trauma is not avail-
able to consciousness: formally—in its repetition—the play will never
69
and endlesslessly will never reveal the reason behind their present
trauma.
M refers to his life before here as ‘just play’ and asks when this life,
this endless existence, will ‘have been . . . just play?’ (361). If his life
before his death was just play, if he sees (wrongly) that his life before
had no real consequence, his life here ironically is always already play
because it profoundly does not have any consequence: nothing fol-
lows from a story that endlessly repeats. In Being and Time Martin
Heidegger argues that a human life only becomes comprehensible
because its end ‘limits and determines in every case whatever totality
is possible for Dasein [individual being]’ (277). Like a grammatical
sentence or a narrative, a life only asssumes an understandable shape
when it is over: thus is Heidegger able to suggest, provocatively, that
‘Death is a way to be’ (289). M’s last line before the repetition—‘Am
I as much as . . . being seen?’ (366)—signals his awareness that the
light, which stands as much as a metaphor for the audience’s desire to
witness as for an externalizing of the unconscious desire to repeat
actions, essentially confers an endless existence upon him. His exis-
tence forever will be tied to the light/audience which compels him to
narrate a story of loss which never will achieve an end. The repetition
of the play thus becomes both a sign of the desire to understand—
to repeat is to understand—and a symptom of the inability ever to
do so.
NOT I
The image as essence
In Not I (1972) Beckett confronts us with his most startling image: a
disembodied mouth situated eight feet up from stage level. Standing
at stage left is a shrouded figure—the Auditor—who four times in the
play offers what Beckett calls a gesture of ‘helpless compassion’ (405).
Beckett is said to have been inspired to create this play in part after
catching sight of a woman in the streets of Morocco ‘crouched in an
attitude of intense waiting’ (622).14 Dressed in a djellaba, this figure’s
attitude of anxious yearning appealed to Beckett at some level (she
was, it turned out, waiting for her child to return from school). And
certainly this image makes sense of the presence of the Auditor who,
perhaps acting as the audience’s surrogate, helplessly offers gestures
of compassion each time Mouth disavows her connection to her
70
story, each time she refuses, as Beckett’s stage directions put it, ‘to
relinquish third person’ (405).15
But the central iconic image in Not I is the disembodied Mouth,
Beckett’s most extreme image of bodily reduction. As Mouth spews
her narrative, what at first seems inexplicable—a mouth, impossibly
situated—becomes clear. Mouth is the subject reduced to its essential
function: speaking. Mouth’s refusal to confront the fact that her
narrative is about her—hence the title, Not I—alerts us to the play’s
(absent) visual pun: the subject is not an I and thus not a seeing, per-
ceiving eye. The cliché may have it that the eyes are the windows to
the soul, but here Mouth is the sign of the subject, the sign of her
identity. What Not I explores is the intimate connection between
Mouth’s traumatic story—which is about how she one day began to
speak after years of silence—and the image of the traumatized, frag-
mented body.
The reduced body

I suggested in my Introduction that Beckett’s work explores the theme
of the interconnectedness of subjectivity and body, the idea that our
identities are contained ‘in’ the material of our bodies. Beckett may
reduce the body—may immobilize it in Happy Days and Play—but
traces of the body remain. As I explained in my reading of Happy
Days, the traces of the body contain the traces of a vanished culture;
in Play the traces of the body contain (just as the body itself is
contained in the urn) the narrative of desire and loss. All these plays
offer a central idea: the body must be present for identity to be main-
tained. This is not quite a version of Descartes’ ‘I think, therefore
I am’. Beckett’s version of Descartes’ cogito would run: ‘I have a body—
or part of my body—therefore I am’. Not I is in some sense a critique of
Descartes because there is explicitly no mind present here: there is
only a bodily fragment. We could perhaps argue that in Happy Days
and Play the mind—however reduced to uttering fragments of lost
cultural or personal narratives—is present in some form. We cannot
really do so in Not I: we have only a mouth impossibly uttering a
traumatized narrative.16
Not I therefore is one of Beckett’s most disturbing plays. The
audience, made anxious by the very image of Mouth, finds itself
assaulted—and I think this is the precise word—by a narrative it
cannot ever fully expect to comprehend, perhaps ultimately does not
71
even wish to comprehend. The actress portraying Mouth is instructed

to speak at an extremely rapid pace, and her story, formally echoing
the fractured image of her body, is fragmented and shattered into
various narrative shards. In a response to an actor who worried
about the audience’s comfort, Beckett said: ‘ “I am not unduly con-
cerned with intelligibility. I hope the piece would work on the
necessary emotions of the audience rather than appealing to their
intellect” ’ (625).17
What the audience primarily feels—and I speak from personal
experience here—is anxiety. And this seems to me an appropriate
response given that Mouth’s state is one of continual—if disavowed—
anxiety as well. After the initial portion of Mouth’s narrative,
detailing her premature birth and desertion by parents, her loveless
life (‘so no love . . . spared that . . . no love of any kind . . . at any
subsequent stage’ [406]), she speaks about one April morning in a
field ‘when suddenly . . . gradually . . . all went out . . . and she found
herself in the—. . . what?. . . who?. . . no! . . . she!. . . [Pause and move-
ment 1.] . . . found herself in the dark’ (406). Notice how this initial
anxious refusal to admit to herself that she is speaking of personal
experience—for surely the questions she asks here, what? who?, are
responses to herself—is initiated by a crucial crisis in her life: some-
thing has occurred to her—an episode of illness? an assault? a
psychotic break?—that renders her ‘if not exactly . . . insentient’ then
‘dulled’ (406).18
Four times during the course of the play Mouth denies any per-
sonal connection to this trauma. Her vehement disavowal, of course,
is a clear symptom of the assault and indicates that she is indeed
speaking about herself. Moreover, the assault has produced Mouth’s
present condition: her inability to stop speaking—we call this logor-
rhea—stems directly from that event in April:
When suddenly she realized . . . words were— . . . what?. . . who? . . .

no! . . . she! . . . [Pause and movement 2.] . . . realized . . . words were
coming . . . imagine!. . . words were coming . . . a voice she did not
recognize . . . at first . . . so long since it had sounded . . . then
finally had to admit . . . could be none other . . . than her
own . . . and now this stream . . . not catching the half of it . . . not
the quarter . . . no idea . . . what she was saying! . . . till she began
trying . . . to delude herself . . . it was not hers at all . . . not her
voice at all . . . (408–09)
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What becomes clear from Mouth’s narrative is that her extreme

anxiety stems more from the effects of the event in April than the
actual event itself. For seventy years Mouth has been largely silent,
save for an occasional outburst ‘once or twice a year . . . always win-
ter for some strange reason’ (408). The assault has propelled her into
speech, into language, and this produces in its turn her systematic
denial of connection to her own narrative. The question of course
becomes: why would Mouth wish to deny a connection to her own
story? Why is this compulsion to speak, this uncanny and belated
entry into language, cause of such anxiety?
Lacan: The Real

I will try to explain Mouth’s condition of anxiety via the work of
one of Freud’s great disciples, Jacques Lacan, whose theories of the
Symbolic and the Real almost perfectly diagnose Mouth. According
to Lacan, the human subject’s identity is mediated by her relation
to three ‘registers’, the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. The
Imaginary designates a stage in the development of the human sub-
ject where she is unable to perceive herself as an entity in her own
right. She identifies herself with objects or people outside of herself;
her identity is mirrored back to her via external sources. Her identity
is thus, according to Lacan, largely an imaginary one because it
resides outside her.
The Symbolic, on the other hand, is Lacan’s term for the world of
language, of discourse, that precedes and exceeds the subject. We are
all born into a world that has language built into it: human discourse,
ideology, systems of thought like religion, politics, or philosophy.
The Symbolic realm is what allows us to enter into human culture.
By adapting ourselves to the various language systems that surround
and bind us, we realize our relation to others. But the Symbolic
register is one that in some crucial ways denies the subject any real
autonomy: discourse, language itself, is not really at our disposal to
do with what we may wish. Languages have rules and conventions:
coming before we were born and being there long after we are gone,
language is a kind of autonomous system on its own and we are, in a
sense, only along for the ride. Because we are born into language,
given it rather than creating it, it is true to say that language thinks
us. (This idea, one of the cornerstones of posthumanist thinking, is
central to my reading of The Unnamable.)
73
Underpinning and articulating each of these registers is what

Lacan calls the Real. The Real is, as Lacan acknowledges, almost
impossible to describe; as Fredric Jameson puts it, the Real is that
‘which resists symbolization absolutely’ (35).19 The Real, in other
words, cannot be described in language, in symbolic terms. The Real
is that which lies behind all human experience, is, according to Slavoj
Zizek, the cause of all experience, and occasionally erupts into our
lives, making its presence directly felt. Because we cannot understand
it—we cannot even conceive of it—and because it has such an enor-
mous effect on us, the Real is always a cause of great anxiety. And
because we cannot describe the Real directly—like the face of God we
cannot look at it—we must resort to metaphors to approximate it.
Lacan and Freud, as Zizek suggests, use the term trauma to describe
the Real. The Real, like trauma, cannot be known, is not, to recall
Cathy Caruth’s words, ‘available to consciousness’. The Real, like
trauma, articulates the subject’s understanding of itself: recall how
Play’s M, W1, and W2 in a sense ‘become’ only their story, how
Winnie ‘becomes’ the traces of her lost culture. Zizek goes a step fur-
ther and suggests that the Real is the cause of the Symbolic in the
sense that our language is always an attempt to get back to, to relive,
the trauma of the Real which has made us who we are: ‘the Real is the
absent Cause of the Symbolic’ (The Metastases of Enjoyment: 30).
Perhaps one way of grasping the Real is to think of how at times
trauma erupts into our lives in a way that cannot immediately be
processed intellectually: a loved one suddenly dies; planes fly into
buildings; an entire country is destroyed by a Tsunami. The Real is
trauma always waiting to enter our lives; as it does it makes us real-
ize—too late—precisely how fragile our comfort really is. Zizek’s idea
that the Real is what articulates our lives is his way of foregrounding
that we all at some level know that the Real is always there, always
threatening to emerge, but that we live as if the Real is never going to
make claims on us.
In Lacanian terms Not I traces Mouth’s traumatic fall into the
Symbolic order. The Real—as that unnamed and unnamable event in
the field in April—precipitates her entry into the Symbolic, into lan-
guage itself. This entry into the Symbolic is distressing for a number
of reasons. Language seems to precipitate a connection to human
culture that was never there. Having been deserted as a ‘speechless
infant’ (406), Mouth has remained largely silent all her life, has because
standing outside discourse and culture, been largely inconceivable
74
and thus able to resist being interpellated into culture. One of the
uncanny effects of this entry into speech is Mouth’s sense that she
now needs to tell others about her life: the trauma is one of a forced
Symbolic connection to others, a connection, moreover, which com-
pels her to confront the lonely horror that has been her life, from her
premature birth to her belated entry into language itself:
then thinking . . . oh long after . . . sudden flash . . . perhaps some-

thing she had to . . . had to . . . tell . . . could that be it? . . . something
she had to . . . tell . . . tiny little thing . . . before its time . . . godfor-
saken hole . . . no love . . . spared that . . . speechless all her days . . .
practically speechless . . . how she survived! . . . now this . . . some-
thing she had to tell . . . could that be it? . . . something that would
tell . . . how it was . . . how she—. . . what?. . . had been? . . . yes . . .
something that would tell how it had been . . . how she had lived . . .
lived on and on . . . (411)
In terms we are now familiar with, this belated entry into language
and the sense of a need to communicate this narrative—which she
does even as she distances herself from it here—creates Mouth as
a kind of archive: she becomes her own archive of experience.
But, and this is of course the crux and central matter of the play,
she disavows her connection to this archive. In essence Mouth enacts
a refusal of history—‘what? . . . who? no . . . she!’—while embodying
the effects of that history. The body—more precisely, the Mouth,
‘just the mouth’ (411)—enacts what it wishes to disavow. Freud once
remarked, apropos the human subject’s inability not to reveal its
secrets, ‘If his lips are silent, he chatters with his finger-tips; betrayal
oozes out of him at every pore’ (78)20: the truth, in other words,
always finds a means to escape and often the body symptomatically
finds ways of communicating its distress. Beckett’s image of Mouth
operates in this sense metonymically (and in relation to Freud’s
remark, ironically!) as a sign for the body proper, revealing itself in
ways the conscious mind would not wish and would, as here, assidu-
ously disavow.
Mouth becomes the archival trace of her encounter with the Real.
The Real, as the unnamable event, cannot be known as such but can
only be partially glimpsed through its traumatic after-effects. Mouth’s
narrative, fragmented, nonlinear, repetitive, keeps circling around the
event of that April morning never naming it but only showing us its
75
traumatic effects.21 More precisely her body—fragmented as it

is—becomes the image of the Real insofar as the Real can be approx-
imated in the Symbolic. The stunning achievement of Not I is the
way Beckett is able to communicate an experience by never directly
expressing it: the event takes shape in our minds in an absence, as a
kind of absence. Beckett, in other words, has achieved his goal of
expressing Nothing. This Nothingness, however, produces effects in
the world in the same way Lacan argues the presence of the Real is
always felt even if not intellectually grasped.
CONCLUSION
The drama of the real
Beckett, we recall, writes that language, the Symbolic, is something
that needs to be done away with in order for the truth of things
behind it to be revealed. I quote again from his German Letter:
As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least

leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into
disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks
behind it—be it something or nothing—begins to seep through;
I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today. (172)
Beckett’s words are strikingly Lacanian and do suggest that he sees

his purpose as a writer to use the Symbolic realm—language—in
order to reclaim something before or beyond language.
I think it profitable to interpret Beckett’s desire here as being that
of reclaiming a connection to the Real. Certainly Beckett did suggest
that he was attempting to find ‘a form to accommodate the mess’ of
human existence.22 Perhaps we can read his plays as precisely this
attempt to pass through language to find the means to accommodate
the Real. Like Mouth, who feels the burden of the Symbolic, Beckett
feels the need to transcend—or obliterate—the Symbolic in its verbal
form to achieve an approximation of the Real. It strikes me that of
the drama Not I achieves what is closest to an approximation of an
experience outside of language. The image of Mouth—like the image
of Winnie up to her neck in earth; like M, W1, and W2 in urns—is an
image of an effect of an event, certainly traumatic, which cannot,
like the Real ever be named as such. I suggested that Beckett’s works,
76
especially from Happy Days onward, become less concerned with the
symbolic-as-language than with the nonintellectualized assault medi-
ated by the uncanniest of images. The image, while still obviously
working within the Symbolic realm—images are after all a kind of
language—is Beckett’s attempt to transcend the limitations imposed
by a received language. The image, showing through the torn veil of
language, confronts the audience with a glimpse of the Real.
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Part II
PROSE
CHAPTER 4
MURPHY AND WATT
The Ego is not master in its own house.

—Freud, ‘A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis’
INTERPRETATION OF THE POSTHUMAN

In the popular and critical imaginaries, Beckett is most known for his
drama, especially Waiting for Godot. But Beckett himself considered
his novels, especially the so-called first trilogy (Molloy [1951], Malone
Dies [1951], The Unnamable [1953]), to be his major contribution
to literature. In this second half of Beckett: A Guide for the Perplexed
I thus turn to consider his novels and short prose. I am concerned
here to track the trajectory of Beckett’s relentless experimentation
with narrative and novelistic form. For surely the novels, beginning
with Murphy (1938) and Watt (written 1941–45; published 1953) and
ending with the so-called second trilogy (Company [1980], Ill Seen Ill
Said [1981], Worstward Ho [1983]), are, at one level, all about interro-
gating, if not deconstructing, narrative form. The novels and short
prose work toward asking what is essentially an economic question:
just what is it that we, as readers, invest, or are prepared to invest, in
the experience of reading the novels?
Beckett begins exploring questions of economy and form in the
novels written in English before his turn to French in the mid-1940s,
Murphy and Watt. To begin it is important to recognize that these
novels, especially Murphy, come early in Beckett’s career and as such
they present what I call an uncanny novelistic shape: they seem at
once to be recognizably ‘novelistic’ and to dismantle our preconcep-
tions of what a novel should be doing. These early novels, especially
Murphy, offer recognizable characters occupying recognizable spaces
81
and times (the narrator indicates, for instance, that Murphy takes
place in London and Dublin in 1936). There are plots in place in both
novels (again, more so in Murphy), plots, moreover, with clearly
developed trajectories: both novels, for instance, are about desire,
Murphy (the character) being the object of desire and pursuit of a
number of characters, Watt (the character) demonstrating a clear
interpretive desire to understand his world.
But Beckett is doing more than merely telling stories here. The
novels present extreme interpretive challenges to the reader; both
novels’ ‘plots’ and narrative ‘trajectories’ are, at one level, mere pre-
texts for larger philosophical concerns; both novels, more than telling
stories, tell the story of the novels’ attempts to tell stories. This is
perhaps all to say that Murphy and Watt are novels imbued with a
radical sense of self-consciousness and self-awareness which trans-
lates and transfers to the reader’s own self-awareness. And as soon as
this transfer is made, as soon as the reader becomes aware of herself
as reader, a fully uncanny moment comes into being.
In Resistances of Psychoanalysis, Jacques Derrida writes: ‘Let us
say for the moment that the uncanny exceeds and not that it resists
analysis’ (4). The following chapters in varying degrees are all attempts
to come to terms with the experience of reading Beckett’s prose. I am
suggesting at the outset that the experience, in a variety of ways, will
always be an uncanny one. If, as Freud suggests, the experience of the
uncanny is the experience of anxiety that emerges when encountering
something that appears simultaneously to be familiar and unfamiliar,
then the following chapters, more precisely, are attempts to come to
interpretive grips with the anxiety of reading Beckett’s strange narra-
tives. And finally, if we follow Derrida, a complicated and in its turn
uncanny realization emerges: perhaps Beckett’s texts—as examples
of the uncanny—will always already exceed analysis, exceed interpre-
tation itself.
In some ways this notion of the resistant text always must fold
back onto the characters within these strange narratives: Murphy,
who is in the grip of determining forces of desire preceding and
exceeding him; Watt, who is forced to submit to the demands of serv-
ing and (impossibly) witnessing his employer, Knott; the unnamable,
who is compelled, obliged, to use his word, to speak the language
of others. Beckett’s texts problematize interpretation because we
encounter characters who themselves lack all agency, who are thus
examples of the posthuman. Beckett’s characters will strike us always
82
MURPHY AND WATT
as uncanny—familiar and unfamiliar—because there is something

essentially missing at their center: and, as we will see, what is missing
is precisely that, a center. Theories of the posthuman, originating in
Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, posit the subject as constructed by cul-
ture, language, drives, and ideology, forces which define the subject,
fix him in place as a figure without a determining consciousness or
interiority. My argument will be that Murphy, or the unnamable,
stand as examples of the posthuman, in one sense of the term: pre-
ceded and exceeded by forces defining them as subjects.
But the figure of the posthuman is also, as theorists as diverse as
Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway, Katherine Hayles, or Paul Virilio,
argue, always a figure of the boundary or limit: she exists just at the
threshold of the recognizable, at the limit of what we expect to be
the human. Again, Derrida’s idea of the uncanny as exceeding inter-
pretation is useful here as it dovetails into our interpretive difficulties:
How are we to interpret the speakers and figures in Texts for Nothing
or the second trilogy, speakers who claim both to be dead ‘I’ve given
myself up for dead’ (Texts for Nothing 1: 297) and alive ‘Nothing like
breathing your last to put new life in you’ (Texts for Nothing 1: 298);
figures who are corporeal and noncorporeal simultaneously: ‘Say a
body. Where none’ (Worstward Ho: 471). It is here that the figure
of the posthuman specter comes into crucial play. If Beckett has
been searching for the means to put an end to language, to find the
‘literature of the unword’, perhaps the figure of the ghost—alive and
dead; a body and not a body—is the inevitable objective correlative
of a language, and a subjectivity, always on the verge of fading out
of existence. Existing in ‘the dungeons of this moribund’ (Texts for
Nothing 12: 336), the posthuman subject can only claim a spectral
agency or interiority.
I thus return to questions posed in my Introduction: how are we to
read texts which exceed interpretation? How are we to read and make
sense of texts which seem to resist, perhaps exceed, the very idea of
sense itself ? The narrator of Watt (a man troublingly named ‘Sam’!),
after describing Watt’s frustrating attempt to make sense of an
experience, asks a question that clearly anticipates the reader’s own
experience of reading Beckett: ‘What was this pursuit of meaning,
in this indifference to meaning? And to what did it tend? These are
delicate questions’ (227). In this moment, Beckett inscribes reading,
makes a theme of reading in advance of the actual reader who, in a
clearly uncanny way, is made to be a double for Watt (or is it that
83
Watt is a double for the reader?) in her reading of a text fully resis-
tant—and fully aware that it is resistant—to interpretation.
MURPHY
Form/content: Free will and determinism
Although not the first novel to be written by Beckett, Murphy was
the first, in 1938, to be published.1 Written in 1935–36 while Beckett
was living in London, Murphy represents what is, for Beckett, his
most ‘traditional’ novel. That is to say, the novel presents actions tak-
ing place in recognizable locations (London, Dublin), in a locatable
time (1936), to recognizable subjects. And while the narrator will
make clear that these characters really are only characters—he refers
to them as ‘puppets’ (76) in a gesture foregrounding their artifice
and thus the artifice of the entire novel—we do recognize their
humanity in ways it becomes increasingly difficult to do as the later
novels progress. Having said this, however, one of the trajectories of
the novel is to place the very question of the ‘humanity’, the ‘recog-
nizability’ of ‘characters’ under scrutiny in a way that compels us to
question the very idea of what constitutes the human subject. Murphy
begins the process of interrogating the subject by placing him a nov-
elistic context that only barely sustains him as a character; that is
to say, these characters all inhabit a universe always threatening to
reveal itself fully as fictional and thus to reveal in turn the very fic-
tionality of the subject himself.
In my reading of the novel the idea of the fictionality of the uni-
verse, the idea that all characters are only ever ‘puppets’ (despite, as we
shall see, the narrator’s claim that Murphy himself is the exception
to this rule), is intimately conjoined to the major philosophical argu-
ment of the novel: that the universe is fully determined, that the
human is subject to the vagaries of desire, drives, and even fate, to
the point that the very idea of agency—humans ethically responsible
for their own actions—is placed radically under erasure (from this
perspective, Murphy can be read as a critique of existentialist philos-
ophy). Murphy here brilliantly links up aspects of form (narrative
self-awareness) and philosophical content (determinism; a critique
of human agency) by demonstrating how Murphy—and I will focus
largely on his trajectory—is subject both to the whims of the author
and of forces internal to the plot of the novel, forces preceding,
exceeding, and ultimately determining him.
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MURPHY AND WATT
What, crucially, remains uncanny about this relation between form

and content is that the ‘humanity’ of the characters, despite—per-
haps because of—the narrator’s at times intrusive self-consciousness,
never is fully reduced: that is, the characters do not ever fully become
complete artifice just as they never quite achieve the status of a ‘real’,
fully ‘rounded’, subject. Shimmering between the real and artifice,
Beckett’s characters work to pose complicated questions to their
readers: just why are we invested in the idea of a stable subject or
character? A stable world? What, precisely, is at stake in the novel’s
delicate, uncanny, presentation of its world?
Self-consciousness; the body as liability

It is clear from the first paragraph of Murphy that we are encounter-
ing a novel which is doing more than simply telling a story. Given
that the novel was published in 1938, toward the end of the period
of literary High Modernism (1918–39)—the period that sees Joyce’s
Ulysses (1922), Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), Forster’s A Passage
to India (1924), Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer (1925), Kafka’s
Das Schloss (1926)—it is not surprising that Beckett’s novel is
self-conscious, self-referential, and philosophically challenging. And
given Beckett’s massive debt of influence to Joyce—Beckett published
‘Dante . . . Bruno.Vico . . Joyce’, an essay in praise of Joyce’s work in
1929—it is not surprising to see an exuberant and playful use of lan-
guage (an exuberance soon to be toned down) in this early work.
But there is something, a hardness to the writing, a fondness for
the concrete philosophical image, that marks even this early work as
distinctly Beckettian. Perhaps too it is Murphy’s characteristically
uncanny mixture of humor and despair that announces Beckett’s
arrival. Consider the famous opening paragraph:
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Murphy

sat out of it, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton.
Here for what might have been six months he had eaten, drunk,
slept, and put his clothes on and off, in a medium-sized cage of
north-western aspect commanding an unbroken view of medium-
sized cages of south-eastern aspect. Soon he would have to make
other arrangements, for the mew had been condemned. Soon he
would have to buckle to and start eating, drinking, sleeping, and
putting his clothes on and off, in quite alien surroundings. (3)
85
As we will see, Beckett tends to front-load the opening paragraphs of

his novels; that is to say, his first paragraphs tend, like the opening
movement of a symphony, to announce major themes, to sound
major philosophical concerns (we see this especially in the opening
paragraphs of the first trilogy). In the first two sentences we hear
the major themes of determinism: the sun shines because it has no
‘alternative’ but to shine (it is curious to apply the word ‘alternative’
to the sun; it humanizes it and thus suggests that determinism is a
philosophical concern to all aspects of the universe, not only the
human). Murphy’s ‘choice’ to sit out of the sun is revealed to be
simply an illusion of choice, an illusion of freedom. The allusion to
Ecclesiastes’s ‘There is nothing new under the sun’ makes it clear that
this determined state of things is simply a continuation of what has
always been; Murphy’s life—and eventual death—is a fulfillment of
a course of action not of his doing or choice. The third sentence, with
its resonant image of the cage (a medium-sized cage, at that) again
works to emphasize the essential captivity of the human subject, of
all human subjects. And Murphy will come to accept this determined
view of things—he surrenders his agency to a bizarre astrological
reading which ultimately leads to his death—suggesting, perhaps, a
desire for the nullification of agency and, more troublingly, a desire
for his own death. (In the final section of my analysis, I wish to suggest
that Murphy can be read as a kind of commentary on Freud’s notion
of the death drive, as outlined in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.) My
questions here will become: to what extent are psychological drives
related to the philosophical notion of determinism? Is there a con-
nection being suggested here—perhaps also being parodied—between
instinct and design?
Murphy in the dark

Murphy, to say the least, is an odd character. When we first meet
him he has tied himself, using seven scarves, to a rocking chair.
Here he sits, naked, rocking himself into what appears to be a medi-
tative state. He wishes to escape the claims of the body, the desires of
the corporeal, and enter into a zone of pure mind:
He sat in his chair in this way because it gave him pleasure! First it
gave his body pleasure, it appeased his body. Then it set him free
in his mind. For it was not until his body was appeased that he
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MURPHY AND WATT
could come alive in his mind, as described in section six. And life
in his mind gave him pleasure, such pleasure that pleasure was not
the word. (4)
We hear an early sounding of the Beckettian theme of the body-as-

liability.2 Murphy’s desire is quite literally to live the life of the mind:
to do so means the body must be restrained. The narrator, in a char-
acteristic gesture of narrative self-awareness, refers the reader to
section (chapter) six of the novel where we find what is essentially an
essay elaborating on the complexities of Murphy’s mind-body
dualism:
Thus Murphy felt himself split in two, a body and a mind. They
had intercourse apparently, otherwise he could not have known
that they had anything in common. But he felt his mind to be body-
tight and did not understand through what channel the intercourse
was effected nor how the two experiences came to overlap. (68)
It becomes clear that Murphy prefers to be in his ‘bodytight’ mind

and that to be in this state requires the body’s continual restraint (if
he were an ascetic, we could say that Murphy mortifies his body).
Murphy’s mind, the narrator suggests, pictures itself as having three
zones (corresponding perhaps to Freud’s notion of the perceptual,
conscious, and unconscious aspects of the mind): the light, half-light,
and dark.3 In the light and the half-light Murphy is ‘sovereign and
free’ (70) to contemplate himself. It is the dark zone, however, that
asserts the most attraction. Here in the dark there is
neither elements nor states, nothing but forms becoming and

crumbling into the fragments of a new becoming, without love or
hate or any intelligible principle of change. Here there was noth-
ing but commotion and the pure forms of commotion. Here he
was not free, but a mote in the dark of absolute freedom . . . Thus
as his body set him free more and more in his mind, he took to
spending less and less time in the light, spitting at the breakers of
the world; and less in the half light, where the choice of bliss intro-
duced an element of effort; and more and more and more in the
dark, in the will-lessness, a mote in its absolute freedom. (70)
The dark, with its removal of agency and the need for agency, sounds
a great deal like being dead. Perhaps we can say that Murphy’s
87
meditative chair-rocking allows him, attracted as he is to the state

where agency and the burdens of freedom are removed, to rehearse,
if only momentarily, the state of death. These are moments of self-
nullification, of ‘will-lessness’, which remove Murphy, temporarily,
from the claims of the world, claims, as we will see, which threaten to
tie him utterly to desires of a distinctly bodily nature.4 Murphy’s desire
to be in the dark in fact resonates back to an early exchange in the
novel between Murphy and his teacher Neary. Neary says “Murphy,
all life is figure and ground” and Murphy replies “But a wandering to
find home” (4–5). The dark, in my reading, is a rehearsal for the nos-
talgic return to the ultimate dark, the ‘home’ that is death. Murphy’s
acquiescence to will-lessness is a giving in to a drive toward death.
The determined character

But we should initially attend to another resonance in this idea of
the dark which unravels in chapter six. Murphy’s acquiescence to the
dark does indeed sound a great deal like giving way to death, but
it also sounds very much like a description of a character within a
novel. When the narrator says, ‘Here there was nothing but commo-
tion and the pure forms of commotion. Here he was not free but a
mote in the dark of absolute freedom’, one is reminded of the narra-
tor’s reference to his characters as ‘puppets’, Murphy now becoming
the ultimate puppet (though, paradoxically, seemingly willfully!).
What I mean to foreground here is the way the self-consciousness of
the novel harmonizes with the philosophical, quasi-mystical themes
of the novel: what is more determined than a character in a novel?
And this novel places its main character—emplots him, we shall
say—in a complex and finely wrought narrative web. Murphy plays
out essentially as a quest novel with the eponymous hero as the desired
goal of a series of journeys. Once a student at Neary’s Academy in
Dublin, Murphy has fled to London to escape the affections of Miss
Counihan; in London, Murphy has entered into a relationship with
Celia, a prostitute who has, pragmatically, demanded he find a job
(to work is anathema to Murphy as it distracts him from fleeing
the material world).5 Back in Dublin, Neary, desperately in love with
Miss Counihan (who still loves Murphy), devises a plan to track down
Murphy (he sends Cooper to find him) to convince Miss Counihan
that he, Murphy, no longer loves her. If convinced that Murphy has
moved on, Neary hopes, Miss Counihan will agree to a relationship
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MURPHY AND WATT
with him. Murphy meanwhile finds employment as an orderly in a

lunatic asylum, the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat. His residence being
a garret with no heat, Murphy demands a brazier be brought into the
room: the brazier is heated via a gas line precariously linked to a vent
in the floor below. Murphy, fully aware that this heating system is
unsafe, is eventually killed in a fire.
It is clear from this brief summary and from my discussion of
Murphy’s addiction to the dark, that Murphy is a novel about desire.
It is about sexual desire (Neary’s, Miss Counihan’s); the desire for
material stability (Celia’s demand that Murphy find employment);
the desire to step past both sexual and material desire (we see this
clearly in Murphy’s addiction to the dark).
More precisely, perhaps, we should characterize the novel as an
ironic examination of the results of misplaced or displaced desire; for
surely Murphy, as a subject, is not the appropriate site for the expres-
sion of conventional desires, of any form of conventionality in fact.
The desires of Miss Counihan and Celia, in psychoanalytical terms,
cannot find their cathexes in Murphy: that is, they cannot achieve
and come to fruition in their object (Murphy) because he does not
have the capacity to realize, to house, their desires. Indeed the trajec-
tory of Murphy, looked at with cynical logic, suggests that the
ultimate result of the various desires failing to cathect in Murphy is
Murphy’s own death: it is only because he is in London, having fled
from Miss Counihan, that he meets Celia who forces him to seek
employment in a place which will eventually kill him.
Which, of course, is precisely, and ironically, what Murphy himself
seems—perhaps unconsciously—to desire in the first place! What is
clear about Beckett’s careful orchestration of desires in the novel is
that there is an inevitability to the novel’s outcome—Murphy’s
death—an almost parodic alignment of the forces of Eros leading
to Thanatos.6 But, as I have been suggesting, we need to keep in
mind that Murphy’s death is effected as much by the economy of the
narrative discourse itself as by the thematic mechanisms, of sexual
(or other) desire: Murphy’s end is determined—plotted in all senses
of the term—as much by the self-conscious narrative voice as by the
various occurrences in the novel. In order to explore this complex
relationship between narrative discourse—call this the novel’s form—
and the thematic of displaced desire—call this the novel’s content—
I wish to examine in more detail the relation between the theme of
determinism and the formal self-conscious aspects of Murphy.
89
The self-aware novel

Because it is very clear that we are reading a novel which makes great
efforts to remind us of its construction, its status, as a deliberately
crafted object. We have seen already how, for instance in chapter one,
the narrative voice refers us to section six (in fact the narrator twice
refers us, in identical language, to section six); at the beginning of
chapter two the narrative lists the physical attributes of Celia, describ-
ing her head (‘small and round’ [9]), and giving her weight (123lb)
and height (5’4’’); here he uses the phrase ‘Hips, etc’ (9) and in the
first sentence of the chapter writes ‘She [Celia] stormed away from
the callbox, accompanied delightedly by her hips, etc’ (9): in this
repetition we are made to look back on what has already been writ-
ten and are reminded precisely of the fabricated nature of the text,
its tissues of self-reference. Indeed the repetition of phrases—‘as
described in section six’ being an early example—is a key element of
the novel’s construction and serves again to foreground the written
quality of the text.
And repetition abounds: Murphy’s eyes, twice described as ‘cold
and unwavering as a gull’s (3; 27); Wylie (a friend of Neary’s) has a
key phrase, twice repeated: ‘For every symptom that is eased, another
is made worse’ (38; 120); twice, Murphy’s personality is described,
rather ominously, as having a ‘surgical quality’ (40; 51). These repeti-
tions (and there are more) serve as blunt reminders of the text’s
written quality just as references to the actual reader (‘gentle skimmer’
[53]), to specific passages (‘The above passage is carefully calculated
to deprave the cultivated reader’ [73]), to the text’s very typography
(141) work to compel the reader into a position of a kind of objective
distance from the text. Beckett produces here a kind of readerly
alienation-effect which works to force the reader to see the character
as moving within a deliberately plotted—the narrator’s word is ‘cal-
culated’—world. One of the effects of these repeated self-references,
these metanarrative intrusions—beyond simply reminding us that we
are reading—is to compel us to see the character as just that, merely
a character.7
Prophecy and agency

And, of course, as I have already mentioned, the central statement of
‘calculation’ in the novel occurs in chapter seven when the narrator,
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MURPHY AND WATT
apropos of one of his characters’ misery, says ‘All the puppets in this
book whinge sooner or later, except Murphy, who is not a puppet’
(76). I take the narrator’s assertion of Murphy’s freedom—or at least
his status as nonpuppet, which may not be the same thing as free-
dom—as being hugely, densely, ironic. First, not only is Murphy’s
end (death) the result of (if not determined by) the desires of others
(and what is the precise difference, Beckett seems to be asking,
between cause and determinism?); Murphy is also strikingly attracted
to the idea of prophecy, of astrological prophecy precisely, which
suggests a willingness to abdicate agency in order to accommodate
himself to the logic of predestiny. Second, Murphy’s addiction to the
dark is a manifestation of the psychological drive toward death which
in its turn suggests that Murphy is caught in the grips of forces pre-
ceding and exceeding him. The narrator’s continual intrusion in the
narrative thus ultimately serves as a kind of narrative objective cor-
relative to the idea of the determined subject: prophecy, instinct, and
fictionality all combine to suggest that Murphy, indeed, is the biggest
puppet of them all.
But, in his relation to prophecy, Murphy does seem to assert a kind of
agency. The astrological chart produced by Ramaswami Krishnaswami
Narayanaswami Suk (22–4), works, like all astrological predictions,
to allow the reader, in this case the all-too-ready Murphy, to see what
he wishes to see. In his adherence to Suk’s chart, thus, Murphy is in
the position of allowing his agency to be determined: this curious
position, at once forceful, at once acquiescent, does sound a major
theme in Beckett’s work: there are forces—linguistic, cultural, instinc-
tual, (perhaps) astrological—preceding and exceeding us, forces
defining us; but simultaneous with this is a sense that the subject
asserts a kind of control (this complex is best, and most famously,
put in the final line of The Unnamable: ‘you must go on, I can’t go
on, I’ll go on’ [407]). Murphy here becomes a site of the analysis—
and I would suggest a fairly serious analysis, despite the ostensible
play of the novel—of agency, of self, of responsibility.
Because Murphy’s rather blind acceptance of Suk’s analysis of his
personality, and the advice given (some of which is patently absurd),
does speak to a desire for the narrative of one’s life to have been
decided a priori. The chart also seems to confirm desires already in
place in Murphy: ‘Avoid exhaustion by speech’ (23); ‘With regards to
a Career, the Native [Murphy] should inspire to lead, as go between,
promoter, detective, custodian, pioneer or, if possible, explorer’ (23).
91
Thus when proffered the opportunity to flee Celia and become a

warden in a lunatic asylum, Murphy looks back to Suk’s reading: ‘But
what made Murphy feel really confident was the sudden syzygy in
Suk’s delineations of lunatic in paragraph two and custodian in para-
graph seven’ (58). Reading into the prophecy, Murphy chooses to see
a correspondence between references surely only related by virtue of
appearing in the same document. His interpretation speaks to the
desire to see shape, synchronicity, and perhaps meaning, extending to
all aspects of his seemingly chaotic life, including his death.
Freud (2): Beyond the pleasure principle

Murphy’s interpretation of and acquiescence to Suk’s prophecy is the
conscious assertion of a desire for determinism, of there to be a
determined universe. In my analysis of Murphy’s death, in the trajec-
tory leading to his death, finally, I wish to elaborate on the unconscious
level of determinism operating in him. It is here, in Beckett’s subtle
parody (or is it a complex ratification?) of Freud’s conception of the
death drive that Beckett begins, ominously, his analysis of the subject
as subject to forces beyond his power and purview.
Freud outlines his conception of the death drive in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle (1920). His conception of the death drive—and his
word is drive (Trieb) not instinct (Instinkt)—in some sense was forced
on him by his observation of soldiers (and other victims of trauma)
whose dreams kept reenacting the shock and anxiety of the original
scene of trauma. These traumatic dreams violated his conception of
wish-fulfillment and suggested that there was, in the repetitive return
to the scene of trauma—a scene where the subject clearly was threat-
ened with death—a force counterbalancing the pleasure principle.
Balancing, perhaps negating pleasure, Eros, was the drive toward
death, Thanatos. Freud hypothesized that the death drive compelled
the subject to return to the state from which he arose: the state of
nothingness. Freud famously writes:
[I]t is possible to specify this final goal of all organic striving.

It would be in contradiction to the conservative nature of the
instincts if the goal of life were a state of things which had never
yet been attained. On the contrary, it must be an old state of things,
an initial state from which the living entity has at one time or other
departed and to which it is striving to return by the circuitous
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MURPHY AND WATT
paths along which its development leads. If we are to take it as

a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for
internal reasons—becomes inorganic once again—then we shall
be compelled to say that ‘the aim of all life is death’. (310–11)
I recall here Murphy’s exchange with Neary where Murphy suggests

that all life is ‘a wandering to find home’ (5). Murphy’s metaphor is
perfectly in keeping with Freud’s notion of the death drive: both
Murphy and Freud speak of life as a ‘circuitous path’, a wandering
trajectory that is essentially a return to a prior state (death; inorgani-
cism), a prior location (home). Life is thus characterized as essentially
nostalgic by both Freud and Murphy: nostalgia is a longing—etymo-
logically it is an illness (nostos: return; algia: illness)—for home, a
homesickness.
It strikes me that Murphy allows itself to be read—at least at one
level, and one obviously not exclusive of others—as a clear demon-
stration of the state of moving beyond the pleasure principle: Murphy
escapes the claims of Eros (the desires of Celia, Miss Counihan, and
others) to find himself in death’s embrace. Murphy’s wandering
to find home is complete at the very moment he moves past the claims
of bodily, erotic desire. In Magdalen Mental Mercyseat Murphy finds
himself in a location with subjects—mentally disturbed patients—
whose states of mind he finds enormously attractive. It is here,
especially in his relationship with Mr Endon, ‘a schizophrenic of the
most amiable variety’ (111), that Murphy seems to have found his
home at last. Toward these patients he feels only ‘respect and unwor-
thiness’ (102); here he has found the ‘race of people he had long since
despaired of finding’ (102); these patients represent, for Murphy, a
‘brotherhood’ (106). More precisely, and crucially, Murphy admires
the fact that these patients, from his perspective at least, have success-
fully removed themselves from the claims of the real world. Murphy
finds he loathes ‘the text-book attitude towards them [the patients],
the complacent scientific conceptualism that made contact with outer
reality the index of mental well-being’ (106). Murphy, rather, sees in
their escape from the world a rejection of the ‘colossal fiasco’ (107)
that is reality.
Murphy’s death follows quickly his realization that these patients
permanently inhabit a world his rocking chair exercise can only tempo-
rarily approximate. Thus, following a game of chess with Mr Endon—a
game which sees no pieces exchanged, a purely static, pacifistic,
93
game—Murphy performs his rounds and returns to Mr Endon’s

room. Endon is catatonic at this point and does, in Beckett’s descrip-
tion, appear almost dead. Murphy gazes into Endon’s unseeing eyes
and speaks:
‘the last at last seen of him

himself unseen by him
and of himself`’
A rest.
‘The last Mr Murphy saw of Mr Endon was Mr Murphy unseen

by Mr Endon. This was also the last Murphy saw of Murphy . . .
Mr Murphy is a speck in Mr Endon’s unseen’. (150)
Murphy returns to his living quarters and, accidentally, intentionally,

dies as a result of a malfunction in his gas fire. And although the
coroner rules his death a ‘classical case of misadventure’ (157) we
cannot help but postulate that Murphy, at long last, has wandered
finally to his home.
Murphy’s death
For some readers the question haunting Murphy may indeed be the
question of intention: did Murphy kill himself or was it an accident?
His last words to Endon—‘the last Murphy saw of Murphy’—sug-
gest some prescience of a death to come, if not an intention to die.
My own reading is quite simple: suicide and accident; death by drive.
Murphy has acquiesced to larger impulses, larger drives here: having
so long rehearsed the state of nothingness—of will-lessness—having
so long been addicted to that (all-too-temporary) state, Murphy has
encountered subjects, Endon being the primary, who inhabit a world
he cannot achieve (recall his crucial feeling of unworthiness). My sug-
gestion is that Murphy’s death is both suicide and accident in the
sense that drives, by definition, exceed the agency of the subject. But
Murphy, having come to realize the ‘colossal fiasco’ of the real world,
has placed himself in the situation where an accident could occur.
Recall that when Murphy moves into Magdalen Mental Mercyseat
he demands the previous warden provide his garret with heat: because
the garret itself has no gas outlet, the only solution has been to hook
up a mechanically precarious line from the gas-vent in the floor below.
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MURPHY AND WATT
During his first night in the garret Murphy awakes from a sleep dis-
turbed by thoughts of the gas being used to heat his room. He thinks
abut the etymology of the word gas (‘Could is be the same word as
chaos?’[106]); he wonders, perhaps with desire?, if gas ‘could turn a
neurotic into a psychotic’ (106); the narrator ends with this: ‘In the
morning nothing remained of the dream but a postmonition of
calamity’ (106). And here finally is Beckett’s description of Murphy’s
death: Murphy is again in his rocking chair:
The rock got faster and faster, shorter and shorter, the gleam was
gone, the grin was gone, the starlessness was gone, soon his body
would be quiet. Most things under the moon got slower and slower
and then stopped, a rock got faster and faster and then stopped.
Soon his body would be quiet, soon he would be free.
The gas went on the w.c., excellent gas, superfine chaos.
Soon his body was quiet. (151)
Our discussion of agency and drive, of will and will-lessness, surely

comes to a crucial point here. I have argued that Murphy evinces
Freud’s death drive in his (willed?) return to death. But the blazingly
obvious point—so obvious that perhaps it effaces itself—is that Mur-
phy’s death has nothing at all to do with agency or drive, instinct or
desire. It has everything to do with the economy—the drive, per-
haps—of narrative, of the narrator’s (Beckett’s?) drive to eliminate
Murphy from the text. The brilliance of Murphy as a novel arises as
Beckett refracts these thematic concerns and theoretical hypotheses
(agency, death drive) onto larger issues of authorial agency. That is to
say, Beckett at once allows the reader to theorize potential read-
ings—wondering about Murphy’s motives and intentions surrounding
his death, for instance—and nullifies them by reminding us that
Murphy is not real, has no motives or intentions at all. It is precisely
here, at the point of Murphy’s death, that Beckett achieves his most
uncanny effect: Murphy has been (un)real enough to die. But the
economy of the narrative, its continual reminder that these charac-
ters are fabrications, puppets, cancels that reality, that death, and
compels us to see Murphy as only a piece in an elaborate chess game,
the consequences of which, unlike the game between Murphy and
Endon, are massive.
What then are we to make of this uncanny effect? How are we to
read novels which work to remind us always that they are fabrications?
95
My own sense is that Beckett, like Brecht, wishes to present art that
in no way allows an escape, a release from the world; his art serves
not as an avoidance of the ‘colossal fiasco’ that is reality but is a con-
tinual return to it. The metanarrative intrusions, these moments that
remind us that we are only reading (but what a word ‘only’!), serve
ultimately to return us to ourselves. The questions a novel like Murphy
raises thus—questions of agency, of desire, of death—must formally,
structurally, become our own. I asked at the outset about the stakes
of reading the self-conscious novel. A careful balance between narra-
tive seduction and a commentary on that narrative seduction surely
is at play here as Beckett continually removes the sense of the ‘reality’
of his fictional world; we are asked not simply to see Murphy but are
reminded of the process by which we see Murphy, a process leading
ultimately to a return to our own reality. Murphy’s most uncanny
effect thus may be in how it serves ultimately, and by ‘circuitous
paths’, to show us our own face in the face of the strange other:
the last at last seen of him

himself unseen by him
and of himself.
WATT
Nobody bears witness for the witness.
— Celan
In many ways Murphy represents Beckett’s first and last attempt at

what we may consider a traditional narrative. Despite the text’s insis-
tent metanarrative intrusions, its attempt to present its characters as
mere puppets, as simply part of a larger philosophical machinery;
despite, that is, the author’s/narrator’s attempts to distance the reader
from the emotional resonance of events, Murphy still maintains the
primary novelistic convention: it tells a story. The same cannot, with
any real degree of confidence, be said of Watt, one of the strangest,
most anxious, most anxiety-producing novels in the modern period.
Context: World War Two

A word, to begin, on the circumstances of the novel’s writing. Beckett
had, in 1941, been recruited (by a friend, Alfred Peron) into the
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MURPHY AND WATT
French Résistance. He joined a cell called Gloria SHH, which was

part of British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and was controlled
ultimately from London. Although his work was not as risky as that
of other agents (he typed and translated reports) it was still highly
dangerous, as James Knowlson notes in Damned to Fame (282).
Indeed, in 1942 the cell was betrayed and a number of Beckett’s
compatriots were arrested by the Gestapo, some to be deported to
concentration camps in Fresnes, Marthhauser, or Buchenwald.8 Having
received word of the betrayal—and his likely arrest—Beckett and his
wife Suzanne fled Paris eventually to find their way to Rousillon, a
small village in the Vaucluse region.
Beckett had started writing Watt in 1941, but it was in Rousillon,
in states of mind ranging from absolute anxiety to absolute boredom
that the novel was completed. (In fact parts of the novel were written
while Beckett was actually hiding out en route to Rousillon9.) It is,
I think, crucial to emphasize the conditions of the novel’s composi-
tion for a number of reasons. The world of Watt is one where nothing
makes sense, where rationality and reason have no place. It is perhaps
too easy to suggest that Watt depicts a world gone mad—like Beckett’s
own world in fact—but this is not too far off the interpretive mark.
My interest here is to explore the implications of Watt’s encounters
with this irrational world, to explore, ultimately, his encounter with
Knott who represents what I call the event of incomprehensibility or
unknowability. This encounter is a traumatic one as the novel makes
clear. It is not simply that Watt is called upon to witness the event of
unknowability: it is that this experience of impossible witnessing
itself cannot be known, or narrated, despite Watt’s—and his narra-
tor’s—best attempts to do so.10 My argument thus turns on Watt’s
peculiar interpretive dilemma: how can you give narrative testimony
to events which are unknowable? How can you truly witness events
which entirely resist the economy of interpretation?
A madness of order
The plot of Watt, if indeed ‘plot’ is a term that applies here, is quite
simple. Watt comes to work as a servant for Mr. Knott replacing the
departing Arsene. Watt works for an unspecified period in the house
during which time he seems to undergo some kind of psychological
crisis; his experiences in the house—including and most importantly
his encounters with the mysterious Knott—affect his reasoning ability
97
and his language (he, for instance, starts speaking backward); Watt
departs Knott’s house, having been replaced by Mick.
Beckett himself referred to Watt as a stylistic exercise written ‘in
order to stay in touch’ with reality during a difficult time (Knowlson:
303). This is (perhaps) ironic given that Watt is a novel clearly about
madness, about the crisis of reason. But it is not only a book explor-
ing the psychological crisis of an individual (Watt) brought up against
the unknowability of the world (Knott): Watt is a novel the very nar-
rative discourse of which seems mad. We could, of course, simply
suggest that the narrator, ‘Sam’ (a friend to whom Watt has described
his experiences), is himself mad but this idea, however correct it may
be from a narratological view, does not fully account for the quality
of strangeness in place in the novel, a quality that, as I see it, tran-
scends the too-simple notion of an ‘insane’ (therefore unreliable or
unstable) narrator.
There is a mania for order and precision in Watt, a ferocious—and
quite irrational—attempt rationally to account for all varieties and
permutations of experience. Early in the novel, for instance, Watt
encounters a Mr Spiro, a religious eccentric (‘I personally am a neo-
John-Thomist’[189]). While Spiro is lecturing Watt, Watt’s mind
wanders. As we follow his thoughts we get a sense both of Watt’s own
psychological instability (a clinician would perhaps diagnose him as
schizophrenic) and the simultaneous instability—the irrational ratio-
nality—of the narrative itself:
But Watt heard nothing of this [Spiro’s words], because of other

voices, singing, crying, stating, murmuring, things unintelligible,
in his ear. With these, if he was not familiar, he was not unfamiliar
either. So he was not alarmed, unduly. Now these voices, some-
times they sang only, and sometimes they cried only, and sometimes
they stated only, and sometimes they murmured only, and some-
times they sang and cried, and sometimes they sang and stated,
and sometimes they sang and murmured, and sometimes they
cried and stated, and sometimes they cried and murmured, and
sometimes they stated and murmured, and sometimes they sang
and cried and stated, and sometimes they sang and cried and
murmured, and sometimes they cried and stated and murmured,
and sometimes they sang and cried and stated and murmured, and
sometimes they sang and cried and stated and murmured, all
together, at the same time, as now, to mention only these four
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MURPHY AND WATT
kinds of voices, for there were others. And sometimes Watt under-
stood all, and sometimes he understood much, and sometimes he
understood little, and sometimes he understood nothing, as now.
(190–91)
What is crucial here is that Beckett indicates that Watt, who hears
voices, is psychologically unstable before his arrival at Knott’s house.
His subsequent descent into madness should thus be seen as further
descent: perhaps Beckett is here indicating that the instability of the
world is largely a function of its perception by the subject. Also
important here is the final sentence which indicates that these voices
bring about a crisis of understanding or interpretation. Beckett is
clearly setting up Watt as what I call an interpreter in crisis (or crisis
interpreter): the entire plot of the novel is mobilized around Watt’s
desire to understand events exceeding his comprehension.
Another way of thinking about Watt—and this may be so obvious
as to go unnoticed—is that he functions as an uncanny double of the
reader: his experience of absolute bafflement before the world medi-
ates and mirrors our own experience of the world of Watt. The novel,
as I will outline here, essentially places Watt is a series of interpretive
moments. His (failed) interpretive acts anticipate, double, and prob-
lematize our own interpretations of these same events. Watt, therefore,
is the first of what elsewhere I have referred to as the ‘specular dou-
ble’ of the reader: his interpretations of events by necessity become
our own.11 And as the specular double is dismantled, so, in a sense
are we: by forcing this link between character and reader Beckett
essentially normalizes epistemological instability—this is the way the
world operates—to the point of producing a great readerly anxiety.
Witnessing
As mentioned Watt is not the first servant of Mr Knott. Ultimately
this is to say that Watt is not the first to experience the epistemologi-
cal, psychological, or metaphysical breakdowns the encounters with
Knott produces. Watt’s first encounter in the house is with the depart-
ing Arsene (who in his turn had replaced Vincent). Arsene’s lengthy,
rambling, introductory speech to Watt makes clear, among other
things, that Knott is the only figure in the household ‘who neither
comes nor goes’ (214); in contrast to the flux of rotating servants,
Knott is a continual presence, seeming to ‘abide in his place, for the
99
time being’ (214). Knott, however, is ‘obliged’ (215) to have servants

care for him ‘being quite incapable of looking after himself’ (215).
Arsene, speaking of himself in the third person, describes the task of
being Knott’s servant:
he comes to understand that he is working not merely for Mr. Knott

in person, and for Mr. Knott’s establishment, but also, and indeed
chiefly, for himself, that he may abide, as he is, where he is, and
that where he is may abide about him, as it is . . . calm and glad he
witnesses and is witnessed. For a time. (201)
Part of the responsibility of caring for Knott is that of bearing

witness to the household, to Knott himself. In fact the relationship
is more dialectical than that: the servant witnesses and is in turn
witnessed. Arsene alludes here to Bishop Berkeley’s esse ist percipi
(to be is to be perceived), and implies that part of Watt’s job is to
confirm Knott’s very being (and in turn have his being confirmed).
Arsene’s final ‘for a time’ is crucial because as the system of ser-
vant rotation implies, and as Arsene makes clear (although not
directly clear), this system of being witness/being witnessed cannot
be sustained for long. Arsene describes how a day came when he
sensed a great change had occurred in him, a change he implies that
compelled him to leave Knott’s household:
Something slipped. There I was, warm and bright, smoking my

tobacco-pipe, watching the warm bright wall, when suddenly
somewhere some little thing slipped, some little tiny thing . . .
It was a slip like that I felt, that Tuesday afternoon, millions of lit-
tle things moving all together out of their old place, into a new one
nearby, and furtively, as though it were forbidden. (202)12
Arsene implies quite strongly that this epiphany is related somehow

to his task of witnessing. And certainly, as we will see as we trace
through Watt’s various interpretive encounters—all leading inevitably
to his own encounter with Knott, who unbinds all holds on reality—
Watt himself will undergo a radical epistemological/interpretive crisis
during his tenure in Knott’s household. Knott ultimately represents,
to recall my main theme here, the call, the obligation, to witness the
unwitnessable, the obligation, as it were, to bear unbearable witness.
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MURPHY AND WATT
In a crucial early event in the novel Beckett clearly sets Watt up—
perhaps in all senses of that metaphor: Watt becoming here a kind of
unwitting victim of an impossible task—as the obsessive interpreter,
the subject desperate to extract meaning from encounters which may
not in fact have any meaning at all. Two piano-tuners, Gall Senior
and Junior, have come to the house to tune Knott’s piano; after their
examination of the instrument, they engage in the following, rather
ominous, discussion which Watt overhears:
The mice have returned, he said.

The elder said nothing. Watt wondered if he had heard.
Nine dampers remain, said the younger, and an equal number of
hammers.
Not corresponding, I hope, said the elder.
In one case, said the younger.
The elder had nothing to say to this.
The strings are in flitters, said the younger.
The elder had nothing to say to this either.
The piano is doomed, in my opinion, said the younger.
The piano-tuner also, said the elder.
The pianist also, said the younger.
This was perhaps the principal incident of Watt’s days in Mr. Knott’s
house. (225)
Watt’s lengthy meditation on this ‘principal incident’ (but note it is

only perhaps the principal incident; others as or more important
could have occurred!) verges on a parody of the interpretive process.
The incident is crucial because it resembles ‘all the incidents of note
proposed to Watt during his stay in Mr. Knott’s house’ (225); that is
to say, all incidents lose their significance (if meaning there was in the
first place) and develop ‘a purely plastic content’ (225); the incident
loses ‘in its nice processes of its light, its sound, its impacts and its
rhythm, all meaning, even the most literal’ (225).
Beckett establishes Watt as one who needs to extract some reso-
nance from events: more precisely Watt needs to be able, at least, to
verify that an event as such occurred. Watt feels ‘the need to think
that such and such a thing had happened then, the need to be able to
say, when the scene began to unroll its sequences, Yes, I remember,
this is what happened then’ (227). Watt, in other words, needs to be
101
able to figure himself as, again, witness to events. Crucially, Watt has
difficulty with events that seem not to mean anything:
And Watt could not accept them for what they perhaps were, the
simple games that time plays with space, now with these toys, and
now with those, but was obliged, because of his peculiar character,
to enquire into what they meant, oh not into what they really
meant, his character was not so peculiar as all that, but into what
they might be induced to mean, with the help of a little patience,
a little ingenuity. (227)
This is a crucial description of Watt. Beckett figures Watt’s interpre-

tive practice as an assertion of power, a will-to-meaning that reduces
the object (the person, event) to something other than what it is:
‘This fragility of the outer meaning had a bad effect on Watt, for it
caused him to seek for another, for some meaning of what had passed,
in the image of how it had passed’ (226). Watt discovers, and I will
argue that there is an ethical component to this discovery, that the
Other cannot—should not—be ‘induced to mean’ but must remain
the absolute Other, the absolute Stranger. Precisely, Watt learns to
accept the event of nonmeaning, the event of nothing: ‘Watt learned
towards the end of his stay in Mr. Knott’s house to accept that noth-
ing had nothing, that a nothing had happened, learned to bear it and
even, in a shy way, to like it. But then it was too late’ (231).
Levinas: Witnessing the unwitnessable

These last words—‘But then it was too late’—indicate that accepting
the event of nothing comes, or can come, at a high cost. The task of
witnessing the unwitnessable and allowing the object to remain abso-
lutely Other—that is, to not reduce it to meaningfulness—is an extraor-
dinarily complicated obligation. The human subject, as Nietzsche
argues, is naturally interpretive, naturally given to find meaning in
the world around us; interpretations, he reminds us, are always acts
of power.13 We tend, in what is essentially an assertion of a kind of
interpretive power, to accommodate unfamiliar experiences by asso-
ciating them to things from our experiences. In this way the foreign
becomes familiar confirming, perhaps, M. Merleau-Ponty’s idea that
‘there is a fundamental narcissism of all vision’ (139).14 But Watt is
called on to resist this urge to induce meaning and thus Beckett asks
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MURPHY AND WATT
some extraordinarily difficult questions: How do you allow the Other

to be the Other? What is the process by which the Stranger is permit-
ted to be the Stranger?
I wish to approach these questions—and ultimately the thorny
question of Knott, the novel’s central image of absolute alterity or
Otherness—via the thinking of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, pri-
marily as set out in Totality and Infinity. Levinas, a philosopher of the
phenomenological school (he studied under Edmund Husserl, the
founder of phenomenology and teacher of Heidegger), spent a great
deal of time thinking through the problem of the Other. Precisely, he
was concerned to define the proper ethical stance the self should
maintain in relation to the Other, the Stranger. Levinas maintains
that one’s relation to the Other begins with the apprehension of its
face; the ‘epiphany of the face’ (214) which translates the essence
of the Stranger; the face which, in its singularity, resists any act of
power. Levinas seems here to understand power to mean both phe-
nomenal, real, power—the power to physically destroy or de-face—
and interpretive power, the power to reduce the singularity of the face
of the Other to something less strange, less unfamiliar, less threaten-
ing (interpretation of the Other becomes another kind of de-facement).
Levinas’ central ethical claim, thus, is that the Stranger must remain
the Stranger. The face of the Other must not be interpretively reduced:
‘The face resists possession, resists my powers. In its epiphany, in
expression, the sensible, still graspable, turns into total resistance to
the grasp’ (197): the face defies ‘my ability for power’ (198).
This relation to the Other, however fundamental, however essen-
tial, is one involving risk; there is a risk in exposing oneself before the
absolute Other, the absolute Stranger; there is a risk in maintaining
the threat of foreignness as such, as a real condition of the world.
Hence Levinas speaks of ‘the Stranger who disturbs the being at
home with oneself’ (39) and the ‘traumatism of astonishment’ (73) that
exposure to the Other can and should induce. For Levinas, it seems,
the relation to the Other, to that which is ‘refractory to every typology,
to every genus, to every characterology, to every classification’ (73) is
the essential relation in the world because it is fundamentally a reve-
latory experience: ‘The absolutely foreign alone can instruct us’ (73).
How then do we negotiate a relation to the Stranger without reduc-
ing his singularity? Through language, through discourse, argues
Levinas. It is within conversation properly executed so as to maintain a
tension between two unique viewpoints—what Hans-Georg Gadamer
103
calls the ‘hermeneutical conversation’—that a bridge can be forged.

It is, crucially, within the conversation that I am revealed as I to the
Other, that I am revealed to myself, that the Other is tentatively
known:
It is only in approaching the Other that I attend to myself . . . in

discourse I expose myself to the questioning of the Other, and this
urgency of the response—acuteness of the present—engenders
me for responsibility; as responsible I am brought to my final
reality. (178)
Levinas’ crucial point is this: in my discursive, conversational, rela-

tion to the Other, I become aware of my responsibility to him, to
‘the call of the other’ (178). The Stranger obliges me to enter the con-
versation in order that his essential foreignness is maintained, in
order that I understand myself as defined in relation to him and his
strangeness.
Thus we arrive at questions central to Watt. What happens when
the face of the Other is unknowable, unperceivable (Levinas seems
always to assume the face can be recognized as a face, that an Other
is locatable)? What possible relation can be forged between self and
Other when all possibilities of discourse, language, and conversation,
are removed? How do you negotiate a relation to the Stranger who is
absolutely fugitive?
Interpreting Knott
For surely Knott is the Other who can never be approached, but, as
the narrator makes clear, who absolutely requires witnessing. Here is
Watt’s understanding of Knott’s needs (this, for me, is the critical
passage in the novel):
For except, one, not to need, and, two, a witness to his not needing,
Knott needed nothing, as far as Watt could see . . . And Mr, Knott,
needing nothing if not, one, not to need, and, two, a witness to his
not needing, of himself knew nothing. And so he needed to be
witnessed. Not that he might know, no, but that he might not
cease . . . . But what kind of witness was Watt, weak now of eye,
hard of hearing, and with even the more intimate senses greatly
below par? A needy witness, an imperfect witness. The better to
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MURPHY AND WATT
witness, the worse to witness. That with his need he might witness
its absence. That imperfect he might witness it ill. That Mr. Knott
might never cease, but ever almost cease. (334–35)
What kind of witnessing is this that maintains Knott always on the

verge of ceasing? Perhaps the answer lies in Knott himself, who from
Watt’s earliest experiences of him to his final, is absolutely protean in
appearance:
the figure of which Watt sometimes caught a glimpse, in the vesti-

bule, in the garden, was seldom the same figure, from one glance
to the next, but so various, as far as Watt could make out, in its
corpulence, complexion, height and even hair . . . that Watt would
never have supposed it was the same, if he had not known that it
was Knott. (288)
Late in the text we have the following description of Knott; it is

one which conveys at once the difficulty of witnessing Knott and
Watt’s absolutely desperate, mad in fact, attempt rationally to codify
all aspects of Knott’s appearance. I will quote only a few lines from
this two-page (!) description keeping in mind Levinas’ idea of the
Other as ‘refractory to every typology, to every genus, to every char-
acterology, to every classification’:
With regard to the so important matter of Mr. Knott’s physical

appearance, Watt had unfortunately little or nothing to say. For one
day Mr. Knott would be tall, fat, pale and dark, and the next thin,
small, flushed and fair, and the next sturdy, middlesized, yellow
and ginger, and the next small, fat, pale and fair, and the next mid-
dlesized, flushed, thin, and ginger, and the next tall, yellow, dark
and sturdy, and the next fat, middlesized, ginger and pale, and the
next . . . (340)
Knott thus is the Other whose face keeps changing, who cannot be
known as such.15 Moreover, Beckett makes clear that there is no fun-
damental contact between Watt and Knott: ‘Between Mr. Knott and
Watt no conversation passed’ (339). Without the essential linguistic
contact between self (Watt) and Other (Knott) there can be no fun-
damental revelation (epiphany) of either self to Other, or self to self
(Watt, moreover, is hard of hearing!). The relationship between Watt
105
and Knott can only be one where response and responsibility fails.
Knott is, therefore, the unwitnessable event, the inassimilable Other,
the emblem of the event of knowing which comes to nothing, to
naught/nought/Knott.16
The trauma of nothing

Levinas maintains that the encounter with the Other begins in
trauma, is a traumatism of astonishment, but that discourse modu-
lates trauma into response and responsibility. Watt’s encounter with
Knott, I would argue, begins and ends in trauma, in a realization that
no contact is possible. The dialogue that should have taken place
between Watt and Knott is displaced into the narrative of that fail-
ure, the narrative that Sam receives from Watt years after the fact:
Sam, who testifies that he does not understand all of Watt says to
him, thus becomes the imperfect witness to an imperfect witnessing;
in this way Watt becomes a doubled testimony of an impossible event.
It is in Sam’s narrative account that we see the truly lethal effect
of Knott on Watt. If no conversation is possible between them, if
language and dialogue fails, Watt’s own language also begins to dis-
integrate, to ‘fail him’ (236), as the narrator puts it. Toward the end
of his stay at Knott’s house Watt begins to speak in increasingly
bizarre ways: he, first, speaks backward, reversing the order of words;
he moves on to reversing the order of letters in words, then the order
of words and letters. This produces strange, yet translatable, sen-
tences like: ‘Lit yad mac, ot og. Ton taw, ton tonk. Ton dob, ton trips’
(305). Knott, it seems, has removed the possibility of his witnessing
and the clear narrative account of that failed witnessing, that impos-
sibility. And yet, even within these strange linguistic disruptions, we
can hear the persistence of Watt’s desire to serve, to offer himself to
the strange Other:
Of nought. To the source. To the teacher. To the temple. To him

I brought. This emptied heart. These emptied hands. This mind
ignoring. This body homeless. To love him my little reviled. My little
rejected to have him. My little to learn him forgot. Abandoned my
little to find him. (303)
These sentences, which sound at some level like a devotional poem or

prayer, speak to Watt’s drive to place himself in relation to something
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MURPHY AND WATT
which exceeds him even as he knows this desire is a failing one.17

There is something enormously moving in Watt’s pathetic devotion,
something speaking to his recognition of Knott’s need for human
contact and a concomitant recognition of his own need to bear wit-
ness to that need.
Watt, finally, is a deeply melancholic story about the impossibility
of knowing the Other and the effects on the self of the recognition
that events and people may always exceed one’s interpretive grasp.
In the addenda to Watt—a compilation of material which ‘only
fatigue and disgust’ (373) prevented the author from incorporating
into the main text—Beckett includes lines echoed in the above-quoted
passage: ‘of the empty heart/of the empty hands/of the dark mind
stumbling through barren lands’ (376). He also includes a fragment
of what appears to be a poem—written perhaps by Watt? By Sam?
By Beckett?—seemingly about Watt’s experience:
who may tell the tale

of the old man?
weigh absence in a scale?
mete want with a span?
the sum assess
of the world’s woes?
nothingness
in words enclose? (373)
In some fundamental way this image of a dark mind stumbling

through barren lands, these questions of the efficacy of narrative to
translate experiences of absence and nothingness, while central to the
trajectory of Watt, become the principal and guiding questions of
the work Beckett considered his most important, the first trilogy.
Watt thus is a turning point in Beckett’s career as a writer for it is
here—in the image of a mind confronting the unknowable, a mind
desperate to know and interpret the darkness of experience, a mind
confronting the limits and boundaries of what his language can do—
that Beckett’s true task—to find the means to translate, to enclose
nothingness in words, to find, as he puts it in his German Letter, a
‘literature of the unword’—is partially realized.
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CHAPTER 5
MOLLOY, MALONE DIES, THE UNNAMABLE
The trace I leave signifies to me at once my death, either to come or

already come upon me, and the hope that this trace survives me.
—Derrida, Learning to Live Finally
Beckett himself considered the three novels comprising the so-called

first trilogy, Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), The Unnamable
(1953), to be among his most important work.1 Certainly it is here
that Beckett subjects the novel to its most intensive critique: in fact
to call these texts ‘novels’ is really to push the definition of the term to
its breaking point. Nothing much happens in these works: In Molloy,
Moran pursues Molloy never to find him (it may be that Moran and
Molloy are one and the same person); in Malone Dies, Malone lies in
his bed telling himself stories as he awaits his death: these stories, as
he admits, are ineffective and downright dull: ‘What tedium’; in The
Unnamable we are confronted with a character (or characters: he is a
radically unstable entity shifting into other personalities, names, and
materialities) who does not resemble anything fully human (indeed
one of his names is ‘Worm’): the unnamable speaks seemingly with-
out direction or focus from within an unidentifiable space and time
(it may be a kind of afterlife, perhaps Malone’s) and presents what is
the most challenging narrative in the history of the novel. If, in 1937,
Beckett proposed creating a ‘literature of the unword’, he did, in 1953,
perhaps succeed.
In what follows I discuss each novel in turn but we should keep
in mind that these novels really do form one large narrative: Molloy
and Malone, for instance (as well as characters from previous novels,
published and unpublished2) appear in the final novel of the trilogy.
It is clear, from one reading at least, that the speaker of The Unnamable
108
is a kind of author-figure who is responsible for having written the

previous two novels. Given that The Unnamable is the culmination of
the previous novels, moreover, and given the speaker’s radically
diminished status, I propose to analyze how the novels work toward
a position of what we can call a posthumanism. We begin in Molloy
with characters fairly intact in body and (in some sense) in mind.
Molloy and Moran, are in some control of their bodies, are able to
move, to ride bicycles but, crucially, their bodies are failing. In Malone
Dies we are met with the immobile body, the dying body. In The
Unnamable we have no stable body—or subject—at all.
Perhaps we are in a posthumous space here in this final novel:
certainly we have arrived at the limits and ends of the human as
embodiment. My interest here is to trace Beckett’s reduction of the
body over the trilogy to suggest that his real interest lies in discovering
precisely what it means to be, to exist, at the very limit of the body, at
the very limits of life itself. Beckett’s posthumanism—his radical cri-
tique of the idea of a materially integrated, fully self-coincidental
human—is never a clinically cruel diminishing of the self for its own
sake, never an enjoyment of reduction as such. I believe Beckett’s
true humanity resides in his compassion for the suffering, dying,
posthumous subject, the subject who, at the extreme limit, maintains,
and has no choice but to maintain, a radically compromised dignity.
MOLLOY
Molloy and the detective narrative: The critique of reason
My reading of Molloy begins with a simple observation: the work
is a parody and critique of the epistemological assumptions of the
detective novel. In some ways it is possible to widen this observation
and suggest that Molloy works to parody and critique the generic
conventions of the novel as a whole, especially the novel in its classic
realist form. The classic realist novel takes place in a specified time
and place; its characters are integrated at least enough for us to rec-
ognize that they have histories, cultures, and backgrounds (think of
how Dickens, for instance, locates his characters within a cultural
and historical milieu from the outset of his novels); there is a plot,
which is to say that something concrete with concrete consequences
happens (Pip finds out who his real father is in Great Expectations;
Anna commits suicide in Anna Karenina; Napoleon invades Russia in
War and Peace). Molloy will undercut all these conventions about
109
character, setting, and plot in ways that critique both the novel form
and its implicit philosophical assumptions.
But, as I say, things are more focused in Molloy because it, generi-
cally, functions as a detective story of sorts. Molloy is a novel in two
parts. In part one we are presented with Molloy, who comes to con-
sciousness in his mother’s room (not knowing how he came to be
there): Molloy’s narrative is a first-person recollection of his attempt
to locate his mother and it recounts various incidents and encounters
on this journey. Part two is narrated by Moran, a detective who works
for an employer, Youdi, who best can be described as mysterious. By
means of a messenger, Gaber, Youdi instructs Moran to seek out
Molloy for reasons that are not ever specified. Moran’s narrative
concerns his search for Molloy, a search that ends with a violent
encounter in the woods with a man who may or may not be Molloy
(Molloy himself recounts a similar incident with a man in the woods).
Molloy thus maintains the structure of the detective novel (a detec-
tive assigned to track down—to find the traces—of his quarry) only
radically to deconstruct the content (the detective never finds his
object; the detective undergoes a process of psychological decompo-
sition which dismantles the philosophical justification of his authority
as interpreter: his reason). In phenomenological terms, our ‘horizons
of expectations’ are radically undercut as Molloy proceeds.
So, to begin, what are the assumptions of the detective story, what
does the detective story say about the world and our relation to it?
The primary assumption of the detective story is that the world is
knowable, is readable: that is, the world is open to the power of (the
detective’s) observation and can be interpreted accordingly. The
criminal’s actions may at first appear mysterious, even uncanny, but
the detective is able, through the process of ratiocination, of reasoned
observation, to make sense of what appears at first glance to lack
sense: there is a mystery, there is a solution. These narratives, from
Conan Doyle, to Agatha Christie, from Caleb Carr to Matthew Pearl,
thus provide, to speak of their appeal to readers, the temporary sense
that there is order in the universe.
A second assumption, one that may strike us as being too obvious
even to mention, is that the world in the classic detective story oper-
ates according to recognized assumptions about reality. In the classic
realist detective story, for instance, time operates in a rigorously lin-
ear fashion: the crime is committed in the past, the criminalist solves
the mystery in the present. This is, ultimately as much to say that
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in narrative terms the detective story—again, in its classic realist

form—is fairly conservative: there are no complex and confusing
manipulations of time and narrative perspective; our narrator is uni-
formly reliable.
The final assumption I wish to emphasize here, especially because
it is so clearly deconstructed in Beckett’s novel, is that the detective
story is premised on the idea of a clear ontological and moral distinc-
tion between pursuer and pursued. The detective story assumes
a fundamental epistemology: there is a clear distinction between
subject (detective) and object (criminal). This basic assumption is one
that governs and dictates how the world is seen and interpreted
(at least in the West). We organize our experiences of the world
according to the logic of oppositional thinking; we define ourselves,
more precisely, against that which we are not: there is good and there
is evil, black and white, man and woman, past and present, detective
and criminal, Moran and Molloy.
Identity crisis
My aim here is to illustrate how Molloy dismantles the logic of oppo-
sitional thinking by analyzing the representation of the subject/object
binary in Molloy, that is, the opposition between Molloy and Moran.
If, as I am suggesting, Molloy operates to dismantle the logic of
oppositions—and it does so in many ways—then we can read the
novel as a critique of the very premises of Western metaphysics,
the very organizing principles of Western thinking. And perhaps the
reader’s sense that Molloy is in some ways undermining their assump-
tions about the world accounts for the real anxiety the novel instills.
This anxiety begins as the reader is confronted with unknowable
characters who recount unstable and uncanny narratives.
Consider, for instance, the opening paragraph. The reader is pre-
sented with a character in a room, his mother’s room. Molloy does
not know how he got in the room; he doesn’t really know why he is in
the room, save for the fact that he seems to be a writer of sorts who
is paid for work he does not understand: ‘I’ve forgotten how to spell
too, and half the words’ (4). One of the things we begin to suspect
about Molloy is that he has no self-understanding: he cannot recog-
nize his past, his history, just as he cannot recognize his present
state. The reader’s anxiety is heightened once she recognizes that all
we know about this world is filtered through a mind that is falling
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to pieces. And, as we will soon see, the one character we would expect
to be able to stabilize this world—the rational detective—is himself
at least as unstable as his quarry.
Molloy (we only learn his name several pages on [18]) begins to
recount instances from his past, perhaps in an effort to learn retro-
spectively how he indeed arrived in his present state, but his narrative
is peppered with mysterious, gnomic, statements that detain the reader:
‘This time, then once more I think, then perhaps a last time, then
I think it’ll be over, with that world too’ (4). What are we to make of
this? He indicates that there will be three instances (this time, once
more, then a last time) where something will occur before something
ends: we presume Molloy refers to his life as the thing which will
end and that there will be an interval where—and here I insert my
own reading—three narratives will fill the time between the present
moment and his death. Perhaps these narratives are Molloy, Malone
Dies, and The Unnamable. But if, as I have suggested, the unnamable
is the ultimate writer of the trilogy (of course he is not: Beckett is)
how can Molloy anticipate these forthcoming narratives? Does
Molloy know he inhabits a fictional universe?
If this question cannot yet be answered (it perhaps will be when we
arrive at The Unnamable) we can at least suggest that for Molloy the
recounting of one’s life always will involve some aspects of fabrica-
tion, of fictionalizing. As he recounts his witnessing of the meeting
of A and C (‘So I saw A and C going slowly towards each other,
unconscious of what they were doing’ [4])—and there are suggestions
that he is remembering an encounter between himself and another
figure, perhaps Moran—he writes: ‘Perhaps I’m inventing a little,
perhaps embellishing, but on the whole that’s the way it was . . .. But
perhaps I’m remembering things’ (4–5). This is a crucial line in
Molloy, and indeed in Beckett: there is no real distinction between
history and fiction. The work of memory, in other words, is a creative
act: the act of writing the story of a life based on memories that are
perhaps inventions thus makes what Molloy tells us highly suspect:
‘Saying is inventing’, Molloy tells us, ‘Wrong, very rightly wrong’ (27).
And, as any reader of Beckett’s prose soon discovers, not only is the
narrative as a whole an unstable structure, but individual sentences
threaten to undermine themselves. As Molloy realizes the degree to
which he is fictionalizing we read ‘What I need now is stories, it took
me a long time to know that, and I’m not sure of it’ (9). This is one
of numerous instances where a character will assert something only
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to deny it: he knows he needs stories, he is not sure that he needs

stories. Here is another example: Molloy is describing the dog which
follows A or C (he can’t remember who): ‘A little dog followed him, a
pomeranian I think, but I don’t think so’ (7). The classic example of
what I call this self-cancelling rhetoric is in the final lines of Moran’s
narrative: he has returned home after attempting to find Molloy and
is composing his report for Youdi: ‘Then I went back into the house
and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was
not midnight. It was not raining’ (170). The lines echo and in turn
deconstruct the actual first lines of Moran’s section of Molloy: ‘It is
midnight. The rain is beating on the windows’ (87).
What do we make of these sentences which undermine themselves?
Molloy thinks it was a pomeranian, but thinks not; Moran says it
was raining, but it is not. I tend to read these individual sentences
symptomatically. That is, they suggest a larger instability in the
subject, an instability, ultimately, in the narrative as a whole. This
instability is more than simply what results when we cannot be sure
if one thing is true or not; it is an instability that arises when we
realize that both things could be true: it was a pomeranian, and it was
not; it is raining and it is not. Beckett compels us into maintaining
both possibilities in a kind of permanent suspension where nothing
certain can be known and nothing can be denied with any certainty.
And Molloy, as a subject—or object of Moran’s quest—is a case in
point. He is an example of a subject who in some ways is beyond
knowing. Lacking history and an identity, Molloy verges into a kind
of ontological oblivion, as he himself acknowledges. Part of this
sense of oblivion comes from the fact that Molloy has, it seems, lived
a life of a tramp, marginalized from culture. As such he has, as he
puts it, ‘been living so far from words so long’ that it becomes difficult
for him to understand the world; lacking language, he admits that
‘even my sense of identity was wrapped in a namelessness often hard
to penetrate’ (27). At another point Molloy offers this reflection on
his attempts to remember his past: ‘But it is only since I have ceased
to live that I think of these things and the other things. It is in the
tranquillity of decomposition that I remember the long confused
emotion which was my life’ (21). Molloy may in fact be speaking
metaphorically here—he may, that is, be speaking of himself as one
who has retired to his room to write and thus removed himself from
the world—but there is also a sense in which this metaphor of ceas-
ing to live speaks to the difficulty of thinking about Molloy: he has
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a name, but his identity is wrapped in a namelessness; his has no clear

past, but speaks incessantly about it; he is not dead, but metaphori-
cally this is: ‘my life, my life, now I speak of it as of something over,
now as of a joke which still goes on, and it is neither, for at the same
time it is over and it goes on, and is there any tense for that?’ (31).
This final statement is in some ways the crucial diagnosis of
Molloy’s delicate ontology. And what is Beckett doing by offering us
this figure in Molloy? My sense is that he is setting the stage for
Moran, the detective. He is offering the reader a character who we
know in advance is an absolute cipher and as such will present mani-
fest difficulties for anyone attempting to figure him out, to track,
trace, or interpret him. Molloy, in other words, is being set up like a
text—perhaps he stands as the emblem of Molloy itself—that cannot
be interpreted by the reader and Moran. If one of the trajectories of
the text is Beckett’s decomposition of the subject-object structure
(we will arrive at this momentarily) we should begin to realize that he
is also decomposing the individual poles of the opposition: Molloy is
a figure who cannot really be known because his ontological status,
his position as subject or agent, is, at best, fluid.3 Molloy’s description
of himself, living a life that is over and that is not over, sets himself
up as the precursor of the fully posthuman subject we will meet in The
Unnamable: how can we—or Moran—ever hope to understand the
time, the temporality, of a subject whose life is over and still occurring?
‘Yes, there were times when I forgot not only who I was, but that
I was, forgot to be’ (44).
Moran: The crisis of detection

Our first encounter with Moran suggests that perhaps he possesses
the appropriate qualities for figuring Molloy out. He seems at first
to be rational, to be able to identify himself (‘My name is Moran,
Jacques’ [87]), and to recount his past with some degree of clarity:
‘I remember the day I received the order to see about Molloy’ (87).
But we soon discover that Moran, like Molloy, is recounting a narra-
tive in which he has come as close as possible to losing all sense of
himself (the fact that both Molloy and Moran will suffer some loss
of identity is perhaps the major clue that they are one and the same
person). We begin distrusting Moran after he admits that his testi-
mony of his experience is perhaps not that reliable: ‘All this is not
very clear’ (102), he admits. Further, he seems to know Molloy
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already or to know another figure who resembles him: ‘Molloy, or

Mollose, was no stranger to me . . . Perhaps I had invented him,
I mean found him ready made in my head’ (106–07).4 Moran’s syntax
reminds us of Molloy’s previous statement (‘Perhaps I’m remember-
ing, perhaps I’m inventing’) and leads us to suspect, first, that this
narrative is all a massive embellishment, and, second, that Moran
and Molloy, again, may be closer to each other than Moran himself
even knows.
What is crucial here at the outset of his narrative is that Moran is
unable to know the status of the object he seeks:
That there may have been two different persons involved, one my
own Mollose, the other the Molloy of the enquiry, was a thought
which did not so much as cross my mind, and if it had I should
have driven it away, as one drives away a fly, or a hornet. How little
one is at one with oneself, good God. (108)
This last sentence does sound the major theme of the fluidity of
identity that is the concern of Molloy as a whole: it does also work to
suggest that, like Molloy, who has no real identity (Moran suggests
at one point that there are five versions of Molloy: the one inside
Moran, Moran’s imaginary Molloy, Gaber’s version of Molloy, Youdi’s
version of Molloy, and the real Molloy [110]!), Moran is similarly a
mystery to himself, at odds with himself, as it were. Our question thus
becomes: how can a detective pursue a figure of absolute mystery if
he himself lacks a stable grounding in the world, in himself ?5
The answer, of course, is that he cannot. And it becomes quite
clear as Moran’s narrative progresses that Beckett is interested in
watching Moran’s sense of self gradually decompose as Moran real-
izes that what he seeks may not exist ‘out there’ in the real world, but
within a self that is already in crisis: ‘Between the Molloy I stalked
within me thus and the true Molloy, after whom I was so soon to be
in full cry, over hill and dale, the resemblance cannot have been great’
(110). As his quest progresses, Moran, accompanied bizarrely by his
son (also named Jacques: ‘This cannot lead to confusion’ [87]), begins
to disintegrate and his sense of self begins to evaporate. Shifts in nar-
rative person indicate the delicate imbalance in Moran’s own mind
(he begins, for instance, to speak of himself in the third person as if
separated from himself ‘It was then the unheard of sight was to be
seen of Moran making ready to go without knowing where he was
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going’ [118]); he admits, again, to not being able to tell his story
‘Stories, stories. I have not been able to tell them. I shall not be able
to tell this one’ (132)6.
At one point late in his narrative, Moran, deep in the woods, looks
at his reflection in the water. This is a crucial moment in which Beck-
ett signals, again, the fragility of Moran’s identity:
I tried again to remember what I was to do with Molloy, when

I found him. I dragged myself down to the stream. I lay down and
looked at my reflection, then I washed my face and hands. I waited
for my image to come back, I watched it as it trembled towards an
ever increasing likeness. Now and then a drop, falling from my
face, shattered it again. (140)
Moran, defining himself in some ways by his quest (I tried again to

remember what I was to do with Molloy) watches, in an obvious par-
ody of the Narcissus myth, as his own identity never quite coheres
into a full image. Following this moment Moran admits that he is ‘so
changed from what I was’ (142) and is resigned ‘to being dispossessd
of self’ (143).
Directly following these admissions, Moran meets a man in the
woods, a dim man, ‘dim of face and dim of body, because of the dark’
(144). The man, whose face ‘I regret to say vaguely resembled my
own’ (145), presents a vague threat to Moran and thus—we assume
this although there is an ellipsis in Moran’s narrative—Moran beats
him: ‘I found him stretched on the ground, his head in a pulp’ (145).
It is a curious encounter made all the more mysterious by the fact
that the reader surely recalls that Molloy too encountered a man in
the woods: Molloy, however, recalls beating his man: ‘So I smartly
freed a crutch and dealt him a good dint on the skull’ (78). What are
we to make of these encounters? Is it possible that Molloy is recalling
details from the attack that Moran, for some reason, has repressed?
Is it possible that Molloy and Moran are in fact recounting the same
narrative and thus are indeed the same person? If they are, Beckett
has effectively deconstructed the binary that would seem to define
the logic of both the detective narrative and of subject-object oppo-
sitions: the detective, unknowingly, is in search of himself.
But Beckett is not content simply to dismantle the subject-object
binary by allowing us to blur Molloy and Moran’s identities. There
are details in both narratives that would seem to prevent such an easy
116
identification: Moran has a son, for instance, while Molloy only

vaguely remembers having one (and we are invited to distrust his
memory); Molloy has a mother, never mentioned by Moran.7 We
could simply suggest that Moran and Molloy forget or repress these
crucial details but, finally, such a reading works against the spirit of
the text. Beckett wishes us to consider the relation between Molloy
and Moran precisely as a problem: what, he asks, is it ever possible to
know about someone else? To what degree is our knowledge of another
always ever a projection of our own epistemological framework, prej-
udices, and desires?8 Moran puts it nicely at the very outset of his
narrative: ‘For who could have spoken to me of Molloy if not myself
and to whom if not to myself could I have spoken of him?’ (107).
As Moran’s narrative shudders to its close, and as he deteriorates
mentally and physically (Moran himself speaks of his ‘disintegra-
tions’: his legs are starting to fail; his testicles, strangely, are hanging
‘a little low’ (151): ‘Physically speaking it seemed to me I was now
becoming rapidly unrecognizable’ [164]), we come to a point of
return: Moran has come home in a state resembling Molloy’s at the
outset of his own narrative. Moran, like Molloy, sets out to write a
report that will be given to his master Youdi (and of course we recall
the texts written by Molloy). His report, as we have seen previously,
contradicts facts, and from what he have learned about Moran’s
decomposition of self, will only be as contradictory as the narrative
we have just read: ‘Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is
midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It
was not raining’ (170). There is a kind of Moebius strip effect in place
here, of course: this final line of the report he will submit to Youdi is
the first line of the narrative we have just read. Report and narrative,
within which the contents of that report are gathered, blur and blend
into each other, offering another instance where oppositions between
experience and its testimony, between history and narrative, are radi-
cally deconstructed.
What Molloy finally gives us is an exemplary instance of discourse
failing in direct relation and proportion to the bodily and mental
failures of the subject who purportedly controls discourse. Which
is as much to say that Molloy, in its dismantling of subject-object
relations, of narrator and narrated, works effectively to dismantle
the epistemological claims of narrative. As the body fails, so does
narrative. As Moran disintegrates, as Molloy begins to wonder if he
indeed is alive, we clearly move into a space where the body is at best
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a liability, at worst, perhaps, something to be discarded. Beckett’s

conflation of the ideas of bodily and narrative disintegration sug-
gests that the idea of the posthuman, which here is only hinted at,
always involves more than simply a dismantling of the material body
and a concomitant thematizing of this process. To understand fully
Beckett’s posthumanism means that we need to understand how
the posthuman must, indeed is obliged to, narrate the history of the
body’s decline into the posthumous: to comprehend the posthuman
subject, in other words, means we need to confront a fully posthu-
man narrative. Hence we arrive at Malone Dies.
MALONE DIES
The limit
In the Writing of the Disaster, Maurice Blanchot writes: ‘The disaster,
unexperienced. It is what escapes the very possibility of experience—
it is the limit of writing [limite de l’ecriture]’ (7).9 I wish to focus
my discussion of Malone Dies through the various implications of
Blanchot’s sentence because it touches on so many of the important
themes of this short novel: writing, death, the limit. My beginning
point here, again, is a simple observation: Malone is trying to do the
impossible; he is trying to record the instant of his death, to borrow
again from Blanchot.10 Malone, as we have seen, is aware of his
impending death and has informed us that in order to fill the time
between this moment and that of his death he will tell stories:
While waiting I shall tell myself stories, if I can. They will not be
the same kind of stories as hitherto, that is all. They will be neither
beautiful nor ugly, they will be calm, there will be no ugliness or
beauty or fever in them any more, they will be almost lifeless, like
the teller. (174)
Malone continues writing until the moment when, we may pre-

sume (and again this may only ever be a presumption), he dies. But
we should listen carefully to the valence of the book’s title, Malone
Dies: the narrative as a whole is a record of Malone’s death and thus
the final moments of the novel, when his pencil slips finally out of his
grasp, is only one of many moments recording the decline:
Lemuel is in charge, he raises his hatchet on which the blood will

never dry, but not to hit anyone, he will not hit anyone, he will not
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hit anyone any more, he will not touch anyone any more, either
with it or with it or with it or with or
or with it or with his hammer or with his stick or with his fist or in
thought in dream I mean never he will never
or with his pencil or with his stick or
or light light I mean
never there he will never
never anything
there
any more. (280–81)
And truly the paradox of Malone’s enterprise is ‘hammered’ home

in these final moments. We have no way of knowing what has hap-
pened here: perhaps Malone is dead, perhaps his pencil has slipped
out of his grasp (as it has before: [216]). What should at the very
least be clear from the trajectory of the novel is that Malone ‘exists’
(in this paradoxically prolonged state of dying) insofar as he is
able to write. He is his narrative; his narrative is his life, his death.
When his narrative ends, after progressing to a fragmented and frag-
menting conclusion, so too does Malone. Thus the attempt to record
the moment of his final, ultimate, death is a patent impossibility.
One can perhaps be writing when one dies, but one cannot write
the moment of death. One cannot record, speak, or give voice to the
moment of death because it is, for us all but especially for Malone,
the moment of the radical absence of voice, of writing: ‘I am lost.
Not a word’ (256).
Writing as play
But we can argue that the energy of this strangely enervated text—
Malone claims to have no energy and thus that his texts have no
energy—comes precisely from the delirious sense that Malone,
already existing at a kind of limit point (the verge of death), is taking
the reader as close as possible to that very limit and, perhaps, beyond.
Part of the frisson produced by the end of Malone Dies comes from
the realization that the narrative really does not end. The unnam-
able’s narrative begins with the line ‘Where now? Who now? When
now?’ (285) as if anticipating the reader’s questions about Malone:
where has he gone? Where is he now? The speaker of the first lines
of The Unnamable, thus, for all intents and purposes, may as well
be Malone. The energy in Malone’s text, in other words, resides
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precisely from the equation he draws—and Blanchot also notices—

between writing and the ultimate limit experience: death.
Perhaps the best place to begin here is to observe how Malone him-
self conceives of his writing. He makes it quite clear from the outset
that writing—telling stories—will be a form of play. It is, as he says,
a kind of game: ‘Now it is a game, I am going to play. I never knew
how to play, till now. I longed to, but I knew it was impossible . . ..
I shall never do anything any more from now on but play’ (174).
He will tell four stories ‘One about a man, another about a woman,
a third about a thing and finally one about an animal, a bird pro-
bably’ (175): this itinerary soon will be changed ‘There will therefore
be only three stories after all’ (176).
What becomes clear as Malone begins telling the story of Saposcat
(who perhaps represents Malone as a child) is that he intends these
stories to function to remove himself from his present state, the
knowledge of his impending death. Narrative, narrative play, pre-
cisely, is a way of stepping outside of himself, if only temporarily.
Part of his difficulty, however, is that the stories he tells fail to allevi-
ate his boredom (of waiting): ‘What tedium’ (181; 186; 210); ‘Mortal
tedium’ (211).11 These stories work in effect to bore himself to life,
back to an awareness of himself rather than working to take him
away. And as he states, perhaps these stories are only ever really about
his own life anyway: ‘What tedium. And I call that playing. I wonder
if I am not talking yet again about myself’ (183). This is a critical
line, if not the critical line, in Malone Dies. Here Malone conjoins the
idea of playing/narrative creation and the inability to move past the
self. The implication is that successful play would work to remove
the self from itself: writing, in other words, would effect a kind of
effacement of the self (writing thus works as a kind of death of the
self, an idea to which we shall return).
Malone is not alone in his thinking about the nature of play. Two
major thinkers of the past century, one a sociologist, the other a phi-
losopher, give important attention to the idea that play has a crucial
effect on the self’s relation to itself and to its world. Johan Huizinga, in
his classic Homo Ludens, notes that play is a form of ordering; whether
it is a game of chess, the seemingly chaotic play of children, or an
organized sporting event, play asserts a kind of order into the world:
Inside the play-ground an absolute and peculiar order reigns. Here

we come across another, very positive feature of play: it creates
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order, is order. Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of

life it brings a temporary, a limited perfection. (29)
Play becomes a way of asserting control over experience by providing

a structure. And Malone seems to know this intuitively: ‘And I even
feel a strange desire come over me, the desire to know what I am
doing, and why’ (188); ‘I did not want to write, but I had to resign
myself to it in the end. It is in order to know where I have got to,
where he has got to’ (201).12 Play thus is a conscious—the word is
crucial—effort to order experience, to know history.
And yet Malone’s desire to forget himself, to lose himself, seems
contradicted by the idea of consciously wanting to know, to order,
experience. Here Malone’s thinking about play harmonizes with that
of Hans-Georg Gadamer. In Truth and Method Gadamer notes that
play, beyond offering order to the world, functions to efface the self:
in playing, all those purposive relations that determine active and

caring existence have not simply disappeared, but are curiously
suspended. The player himself knows that play is only play and
that it exists in a world determined by the seriousness of purposes.
But he does not know this in such a way that, as a player, he actu-
ally intends this relation to seriousness. Play fulfills its purpose
only if the player loses himself in play. (102)
Malone’s frustration that he is unable to play successfully (‘And I call

that playing’) is in harmony with Gadamer’s idea that the self, to
play, must lose himself in play: ‘I wonder if I am not talking yet again
about myself ?’
Malone thus offers two ideas about play, perhaps two contradic-
tory ideas: on the one hand play is a conscious assertion of order. As
such the self must, logically, be in place doing the ordering. But on the
other hand Malone clearly wishes to tell effective stories that take him
away from himself, freeing the author from what amounts to a kind
of inevitable and unavoidable narcissism. It seems to me that this is
the crux of Malone’s problem. He wants both aspects of play to be in
place as the stories proceed. He wishes to order, shape, and comment
on his stories (indeed he is the stories’ first critic, and a harsh one at
that!); and he wants not to be there at all. How can this aporia—
a word meaning impasse: a word favored by Derrida and used by
Malone himself (175) and by the unnamable (280)—be resolved?13
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Writing into death: The unword

In some ways logically it cannot, at least until Malone himself dies.
And this, for me, is where Beckett’s novel aligns itself with Blanchot.
Both Malone and Blanchot are concerned with the relation between
writing and its limit; both also understand that the relation between
the self and writing is one always shaped by the writer and the writ-
ing’s relation to the disaster, to death, the ultimate limit space. But
the disaster, as Blanchot tells us (reminding us of the logic of trauma),
is unrepresentable, is what escapes writing and is therefore unexperi-
enced. This is what Blanchot means when he writes ‘There is no
reaching the disaster’ (1).
But in some ways Malone does reach the disaster, and does repre-
sent it, does he not? The novel reaches its maximum impact at the
moment it (seemingly) ends. This blank space at the close of the novel
after ‘never anything/there/any more’ (281) is what the novel has
in some sense been trying to achieve, to create, to write. Malone
through his stories, these small rehearsals for death, has been trying
to remove himself from his own narcissistic identification with him-
self. He has tried, thus, not to be present at his own life or his own
death. This blank space where writing, and thus being, ceases, is what
he has aimed for, is the ideal space of the posthumous—posthuman—
unword, what Blanchot calls ‘Ruin of words, demise writing’ (33).
The achievement of the posthuman space, the space of death,
comes at a high cost, obviously. Malone’s text is testimony—a last
will and testament, actually—to the difficulty of shaking off the self
that insistently makes itself present in the author’s writing. The final
story that Malone tells before his death is the story of the murder
of several mental patients at the hands of the schizoid Lemuel (who,
again, like Saposcat, may be avatar of Malone himself). Lemuel mur-
ders these patients at what appears to be the very moment that
Malone himself expires. This conjoining of fictional murder and the
death of the writing subject should signal to us the uncanny relation
between the writer and his writing.14 In one sense we could argue that
by murdering his characters—characters who perhaps always serve
only to remind Malone of himself, always, at any rate, working to
bring himself back to himself—is a way of killing himself. Writing
becomes suicide and thus the posthuman condition, the movement
into the space of the unnamable—which perhaps is one ‘name’ for
the space of death—is achieved by the murder of writing itself. Surely
this is a radical idea and yet surely it makes sense of Malone’s own
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observations about his own writing: ‘A thousand little things to

report, very strange, in view of my situation, if I interpret them cor-
rectly. But my notes have a curious tendency, as I realize at last, to
annihilate all they purport to record’ (252).These stories, these little
failing rehearsals for death, must themselves be eliminated in order
for the writing subject to die and finally escape himself. Malone
Dies thus seems to bring an end to the writer and any semblance
of narrative itself. What, then, can Beckett possibly offer us in The
Unnamable?
THE UNNAMABLE
The Posthuman
In Culture After Humanism: History, Culture, Subjectivity, Iain
Chambers writes: ‘To accept the idea of post-humanism means to
register limits; limits that are inscribed in the locality of the body, of
the history, the power and the knowledge, that speaks’ (26). In crucial
ways Beckett’s works interrogate what it means to be, to exist, at the
limit point: Malone’s attempt to inscribe the moment—the limit—of
his own life as it becomes his death is a major emblem of this idea.
But surely the text that would seem most effectively to embody the
idea of the posthuman is The Unnamable, the novel which brings the
human to and past its terminal point. And Chambers’ ideas are a
good starting point: because in some ways aspects of the body are still
in place in The Unnamable, if only to register its limits; some kinds of
history and knowledge similarly are in place again if only to register
their effacement. This is perhaps to say that for Beckett the posthu-
man condition is that which acknowledges the extreme limits and
limitations of the human—its body, its history, its language, power
and knowledge—but it is also one that suggests that because the
body persists, despite itself, to spite itself, a full erasure of the human
(and its language) is never possible (a theme to be touched on again
in Texts for Nothing). Hence, from one perspective, the famous final
lines of the novel can be read as a despairing acknowledgment of the
failure to bring about a final end of the human: ‘you must go on,
I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ (407).
What then does this exploration of the posthuman condition mean
for the reader? Perhaps, as for the speaker of the novel itself, our first
experience of the unnamable’s world is one of confusion: ‘Where
now? Who now? When now?’ (285). Notice how in these first words,
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Beckett dismantles the presuppositions of the conventional novel:

instead of giving us the traditional novelistic markers of temporality
and identity (‘Call me Ishmael’), Beckett gives his speaker only
questions, questions, moreover, shared by the reader himself. And
immediately we move beyond questions into direct contradiction.
‘Unquestioning’ (285), the unnamable says after having asked three
questions; ‘I, say I. Unbelieving’ (285), he says in a phrase which
again dismantles the stability of identity. And surely the most crucial
assertion in this first paragraph, as for the novel as a whole, is the
unnamable’s inability to name himself, that is, his inability to identify
his language as his own: ‘I seem to speak, it is not I, about me, it is not
about me’ (285). We have thus a speaker unsure of where he is, who
he is, when he is. We have a speaker not sure that he even is speaking
and certainly not able to identify himself as either the speaker or the
object of discourse.
This is all perhaps to say that, at the outset, for Beckett, the post-
human condition means something like the dismantling of identity
and the inability fully to speak of this process of self-dispossession
(we have seen hints of this in Moran’s psychological/physical break-
down in Molloy and in the fragmentation of language at the end of
Malone Dies).15 Perhaps the easiest way to begin thinking about the
posthuman condition is to assert that, for Beckett, to be posthuman
is to be postnarrative; that is, to be posthuman is to be in a space
where it is impossible to locate oneself within discourse. Notice, for
instance, how the sense of the final long sentence in the first para-
graph absolutely evaporates as the speaker loses his thread:
The fact would seem to be, if in my situation one may speak of

facts, not only that I shall have to speak of things of which I can-
not speak, but also, which is even more interesting, but also that
I, which is if possible even more interesting, that I shall have to,
I forget, no matter. (285–86)
The unnamable cannot narrate, which is to say, looking at the ety-

mology of the word, the unnamable cannot know or tell his story.
But yet, and this is crucial for his construction ‘in’ in the posthuman,
he is ‘obliged to speak’ (286). Our task here will be to think about
the nature of this obligation as it plays out in this terminal, limit,
narrative.
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Speaking/being spoken
Terminal may be the best metaphor here, given the sense readers
have that we are in a kind of afterlife. The fact, for instance, that
the unnamable sees Malone, who we have presumed dead—‘Of his
mortal liveliness little trace remains’ (286)—lends support to the idea
that we are quite literally in a posthuman, if not posthumous space.
And yet, we are not quite there, not quite at the end: ‘Is this not
rather the place where one finishes vanishing?’ (287) the unnamable
asks, pointing out that perhaps this is more of a liminal space, a
limbo where some trace of the past remains, where the posthuman
condition is yet to be achieved.16
What does become clear to the reader is that this text will not tell
any coherent story, will not offer even the stuttering failing narratives
of Malone Dies, will not offer the aporetic narratives of Molloy or
Moran. Here we have simply an extended meditation on the condi-
tion of being within an unidentifiable space and time with a radically
unstable narrator who spends a great deal of energy thinking about
the relation between his position as subject—who he is—and his
language. Most curious is the speaker’s assertion that his voice is not
his own:
This voice that speaks, knowing that it lies . . . It issues from me, it
fills me, it clamours against my walls, it is not mine, I can’t stop it,
I can’t prevent it . . . It is not mine, I have none, I have no voice and
must speak. (301)
I have to speak, whatever that means. Having nothing to say, no
words but the words of others, I have to speak. (308)
I am walled round with their vociferations, none will ever know
what I am, none will ever hear me say it, I won’t say it, I can’t say
it, I have no language but theirs . . . (319)
I say what I am told to say. (339)
Is there a single word of mine in all I say? (341)
the words are everywhere, inside me, outside me, well well, a min-
ute ago I had no thickness, I hear them, no need to hear them, no
need of a head, impossible to stop them, impossible to stop, I’m in
words, made of words, others’ words, what others, the place too,
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the air, the walls, the floor, the ceiling, all words, the whole world
is here with me, I’m the air, the walls, the walled-in one, everything
yields, opens, ebbs, flows, like flakes, I’m all these flakes . . . I’m all
these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground
for their settling . . . (379–80)
My own reading of the speaker’s aporetic sense of agency begins

with the idea that what he is really speaking about is the relation
between language and identity. In some sense we exist insofar as
we are able to speak ourselves into being; we exist insofar as we can
identify—that is speak about—ourselves; we exist insofar as we
can speak about a history, a context. ‘Language is the house of being’
(213), says Heidegger.17 Gadamer puts it another way: ‘Language is
not just one of man’s possessions in the world; rather, on it depends
the fact that man has a world at all’ (Truth and Method: 443). The
unnamable’s difficulty resides here: he senses that his language is not
his own, that instead of speaking himself into being, he is being
spoken into being. He has a curious sense of language as a kind of
foreign presence, a virus, if you will, that controls him, rather than a
tool that he may control to fix himself in the world.18 A correlative to
this sense of language exceeding his grasp is the fluidity of his iden-
tify: he refers to himself (or of characters, ‘vice-existers’, who perhaps
represent himself) as Basil (303), Mahood (303), and Worm (331),
surely this last being a name signaling the absolute loss of anything
recognizably human.
But I wonder if what the unnamable is sensing here—the fact that
language seems to control him—is in fact an accurate representation
of what it means actually to be a human subject. Who really can claim
to control language? None of us invented the words we speak; none
of us really think consciously of the language we use as we use it.
Language, to borrow a metaphor from Roland Barthes, precedes and
exceeds the human subject.19 It was there before you were born, it will
be there after you are gone: you are, in some sense, simply along for
the ride. The unnamable’s sense that he is made of others’ word is,
frankly, an accurate reflection of being human, but given that the
unnamable’s is such a dramatic presentation of a condition of com-
ing after, the posthuman, can we not thus begin to read the text as
a suggestion that being human is in some sense always already to be
posthuman in one’s relation to language? That is, does The Unnam-
able not finally suggest that being human is always to be forced to
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relinquish control over one’s sense of self insofar as the self is

language?
The novel suggests therefore that our identities are already formed
by a preexisting order of things—that is, discourse—and the human
simply ‘catches up’ to what is already in place.20 We are always in the
space of coming after a system of language which preconditions our
being and that finally and fundamentally, therefore, must create us as
discontinuous beings. As the unnamable says: ‘I. Who might that be?’
(330). The truly unsettling effect of this question, as for all instances
where the unnamable speaks of himself in the first person (which is
often), is that this signifier ‘I’, one we assume to be absolute in its ref-
erence to the speaking subject, now floats free of his control: this
word ‘I’ is not his and thus even these extended meditations on being
dispossessed of language cannot be said to reflect truly his condition,
which, unsettlingly, is our condition.21
Subject as character
The unnamable, as ‘character’, thus is an allegory of all humans, an
allegory of what it means to be within language that precedes and
exceeds you: we may suggest here that Beckett, by demonstrating our
own resemblance to the unnamable’s condition of being in language,
has in fact succeeded in critiquing any facile opposition of human/
posthuman. But the unnamable is also a representation of a specific
kind of human, one with an acute relation to language. The text is
woven through with suggestions that the speaker of this text is in fact
the creator of the previous novels in this trilogy. ‘All these Murphys,
Molloys and Malones do not fool me. They have made me waste my
time, suffer for nothing, speak of them when, in order to stop speak-
ing, I should have spoken of me and of me alone’ (297). As we read
these lines we may pause and think again of what the unnamable has
said about being spoken into existence: what is a more perfect repre-
sentation of the idea of being spoken, written into existence, than
a character within a novel? Murphy, Molloy, and Malone now look
to have no agency at all because they are merely characters within
a novel (indeed, this is precisely what I argued in my chapter on
Murphy!).
What now is clear is that the unnamable is, first, perhaps the author
of these previous characters and, more uncannily, alive to the sense
that perhaps he also is a character within a novel similarly being
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spoken by a voice, an authority, an author, preceding and exceeding

him. The Unnamable thus becomes a novel of acute self-consciousness,
self-awareness, and self-reflexivity: a novel with a character who is an
author meditating on being a character within a novel. And perhaps
now we can begin to see his shifting from one identity to another—
from Basil to Mahood to Worm—as the unnamable’s desperate
attempt to assert a kind of agency within the limited space of interi-
ority he has been given.
Within this ‘oubliette’ (362), this dungeon of his own diminished
and forgotten interiority, the unnamable is able, indeed compelled,
to assert himself in the face of his own absolute weakness. The
unnamable, like a great number of Beckett’s characters, wishes to
stop speaking, which amounts to the desire to stop being: but his
sense of being within the control of another, within the authorizing
language of another, within the novel of another, makes his desire an
absolute impossibility:
Unfortunately I am afraid, as always, of going on. For to go on

means going from here, means finding me, losing me, vanishing
and beginning again, a stranger first, then little by little the same
as always, in another place, where I shall say I have always been,
of which I shall know nothing. (296)
We can thus piece together a sense of the aporia of being a subject

within Beckett. The subject is always subject to the authorizing con-
trol of another; the subject is controlled by the authorizing discourse
of another who precedes and exceeds him; the subject, nevertheless,
is compelled—obliged—to speak knowing that his language is not
his own (surely we are reminded of Not I). If language is the house of
being, the Beckettian subject is homeless. Yet, he is forced to speak of
this condition of distance. And we should, of course, recall Beckett’s
own sense of his relation to language and the artistic impulse. In
Three Dialogues he has said that he prefers: ‘The expression that
there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing
from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express,
together with the obligation to express’ (139). Surely this summation
of the artistic obligation is strikingly similar to the condition of being
that the unnamable traces: homelessness, distance, from desire,
power, and language. If I am correct in positing a definition of the
posthuman as that which cannot control language, is it possible that
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Beckett outlines here a sense of the artist as posthuman? If we

translate his self-diagnosis to the representation of the unnamable as
artist, the answer of course is yes.
I wish to conclude here by suggesting that The Unnamable brings
us as close as possible to the posthuman condition if we take that
condition to mean the following: an absolute diminishing of the
material, phenomenal body; a distance from discourse (what I am
calling ‘homelessness’); an existence on the limit, ‘in’ the limit, of
what it means, thus, to be human. In some sense the unnamable has
become merely a series of impulses, a reflex action of a language that
dictates his movement, his thoughts. He has not fully left behind the
materiality of the body (he speaks of his tears, hands, knees), but we
never feel his body cohere. He is, to borrow once more and finally
from Blanchot, a subjectivity without a subject: he is a free-floating
consciousness attached to no particular body or agency but at times
exhibits a kind of compromised interiority (he does, we cannot forget,
actively meditate on the condition of being spoken). Here is Blanchot:
One ought perhaps to speak of a subjectivity without any subject:

the wounded space, the hurt of the dying, the already dead body
which no one could ever own, or ever say of it, I, my body. This is
a body animated solely by mortal desire: the desire of dying—
desire that dies and does not thereby subside. (30)
The unnamable says ‘I think I’ll soon be dead, I hope I find it a

change’ (389) indicating, with brutal humor, that he inhabits a condi-
tion that is perhaps already posthumous; he has indicated, as we have
seen, his distance from himself, his identity and body: ‘I. Who might
that be?’ His sole desire, if desire is the correct word—perhaps ‘com-
pulsion’ is a better word, perhaps ‘obligation’—is to find the means
to end his language: ‘the search for the means to put an end to things,
an end to speech, is what enables the discourse to continue’ (293).
Spoken against his will, the unnamable’s desire is to find the end of
speech which, as for Malone, will mean the end of his being. His
desire, therefore, truly is for the desire of the Other to cease. For is it
not clear that it is the language of the Other that animates him? Is
it not clear that this viral language seems to exhibit the desire to keep
the unnamable alive? Is it not clear that this desire of language, be
it the desire of the author’s language, or merely language altogether,
is what must stop in order for the unnamable finally to fade away?
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CHAPTER 6
TEXTS FOR NOTHING, THE SECOND TRILOGY
But the long habit of living indisposeth us for dying.

—Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia
TEXTS FOR NOTHING

In the final sentence of his recent book How to Read Lacan, Slavoj
Zizek, who has never paid much attention to Beckett’s work, unex-
pectedly links the unnamable’s inability to cease being with the
Lacanian notion of the drive:
This simple persistence against all odds is ultimately the stuff

ethics is made of—or, as Samuel Beckett puts it in the last words
of the absolute masterpiece of twentieth-century literature, The
Unnameable (sic), a saga of the drive that perseveres in the guise
of an undead partial object, ‘in the silence you don’t know, you
must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on’. (119–20)
Zizek is correct to note the link between Lacan and Beckett, but
I wonder if his comment might apply more accurately to the work
which immediately followed The Unnamable, Texts for Nothing.
Published in French in 1955 (in English in 1967) these thirteen short
texts are uncannily similar in tone to The Unnamable. It is as difficult
to know where and when these stories occur; the narrator is never
fully identifiable; there is no plot to speak about; the subject of the
texts—the speaking subject, what Zizek calls the ‘undead partial
object’—is as likely an exemplar of Blanchot’s subjectivity without
any subject as the unnamable. Beckett himself referred to the texts as
130
‘the grisly afterbirth of L’innomable’ (Brater: 254) thereby genetically

linking the two texts.1 He also, importantly, considered Texts a fail-
ure: in an interview with Israel Shenker he said he had hoped Texts
for Nothing would enable him to ‘get out of the attitude of disinte-
gration [of the trilogy] but it failed’ (‘An Interview’: 148).
I here will consider these texts as furthering Beckett’s own drive to
put an end to the human subject and as part of his attempt to find
the ‘literature of the unword’, that quest that had haunted him since
1937. Texts for Nothing, as well as the texts comprising the so-called
second trilogy, thus will be read here as continuing Beckett’s explora-
tion of the link between posthuman subjectivities and posthuman
discourse.
The failure to end

Perhaps Beckett’s idea that Texts represents a failure of sorts is the
best place to begin. He considers them a failure because they were
unable to get past the attitude of disintegration in the trilogy, espe-
cially, I suggest, in The Unnamable. This sense of failure would imply
that he had hoped, perhaps, that Texts would see an integration of
sorts. But it is hard to think that Beckett wished simply to revert to a
more coherent view of the subject, of the human. I am thus tempted
to see the regret that Beckett expresses as symptomatic more of his
sense that he has failed to put an end, finally, to the human. That is
to say, the sense of failure to get past this attitude of disintegration
expresses not a vain hope that the subject would again cohere but a
frustration that the subject persists despite Beckett’s best efforts to
destroy it. Zizek’s idea of the ‘undead partial object’ is the perfect
metaphor for Beckett’s subjectivity without subject, given that the
speaker of these texts will variously represent himself as alive and
dead and only partially embodied, ‘almost restored to the feasible’
(4: 308), and yet strangely insistent on claiming a kind of life. The
speaker of these texts here becomes the lingering ‘nothing’ to which
the title, perhaps, refers: he is a no-thing rather than a no-one because
he has moved past all claims to a fully human position.
Our task as readers of these texts, therefore, is to try and under-
stand the peculiar state of the speaker, a state that confounds and
defies the author himself. And my suggestion is that we must begin by
linking these texts—as Beckett himself does—back to The Unnamable.
In that text the subject truly only existed insofar as he was spoken by
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an agency preceding and exceeding him. More, he seemed to inhabit

a time and space not immediately (or ever) identifiable: he may be in
a kind of temporal-spatial limbo, a no-man’s land (or time) ‘after’
death. If that position were not complicated enough, consider now
the position (or positions) of the speaker (or speakers) of Texts for
Nothing. In the first line of the first text the speaker, alluding clearly
to the last line of The Unnamable, makes it clear that he has failed to
take the unnamable’s ‘you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ to
heart: ‘Suddenly, no, at last, long last, I couldn’t any more, I couldn’t
go on’ (1:295). He suggests that, while he does have a body (‘I say to
the body, Up with you now’ [1:295]), the body may itself be dead
‘I am down in the hole the centuries have dug’ (1:296) where faces
look down on him ‘as in a graveyard’ (1:296).
Having ‘given myself up for dead all over the place’ (1:297) it
seems the speaker further complicates the ontological position of the
unnamable. Perhaps the best way to think of the speakers of these
texts is as a spectral subject: the speaker has died but, like a phantom,
is still haunting the world, and, what is more, haunting himself:
‘nothing like breathing your last to put new life in you’ (1:298). Our
subject exists in what we could call the aftermath of ontology: he is
beyond life, beyond death, beyond time, beyond space. But yet these
texts make references to real geographical locations (The Gobi desert
[3:302]; London [6:313]; Ireland, Paris [8:322], to people (Mr Joly;
the Graves brothers [2:300; 301]). There is an uncanny sense in
which these texts manifest the most perplexing subjectivity in Beckett
(a living subject who is dead) and place that subjectivity in a recog-
nizable world. Our task is to begin thinking about what it would
mean to be a spectral subject, to attempt, that is, to think through
the logic of the state beyond ontology—‘no souls, or bodies, or birth,
or life, or death’ (10:329)—but which persists within a world that
we know.
‘Fantasies of non-being’
Hugh Kenner usefully referred to Texts for Nothing as thirteen ‘fan-
tasies of non-being’ (119). And in some ways this description is still
the best. I think it is possible to begin sifting through these texts to
see how Beckett offers a variety of these phantasmic positions, how
he offers a series of meditations on what it means, or what it would
132
mean, not to be.2 For instance, some of these texts read like the
thoughts of a prisoner: ‘Do my keepers snatch a little rest and sleep
before setting about me afresh’ (6:313); or perhaps these texts repre-
sent the disordered thoughts of an Alzheimer’s patient (but one who,
painfully, is aware of his mind slipping away from him):
What can have become then of the tissues I was, I can see them no
more, feel them no more, flaunting and fluttering all about me and
inside me . . . The eyes, yes, if these memories are mine, I must
have believed in them an instant, believed it was me I saw there
dimly in the depths of their glades. (6:314–15)
Perhaps the speaker is simply one suffering in the aftermath of

a massive, yet unnamed (perhaps because unnamable) trauma, a
trauma that has disordered his sense of time and space:
Yes, my past has thrown me out, its gates have slammed behind
me, or I burrowed my way out alone, to linger a moment free in
a dream of days and nights, dreaming of me moving, season after
season, towards the last, like the living, till suddenly I was here, all
memory gone. (8:320–21)
These fantasies—of being a prisoner, of being a patient, of suffering

an unknowable trauma—all amount to the same thing: the subject is
cast into a time and space (but as he says ‘time has turned into space
and there will be no more time’ [8:320]) where he is no longer fully
present to himself, to the world. To use the speaker’s own gruesome
image (and one to which I will return), the speaker of these texts has
died, several times, rehearses his death several times, is dead in more
ways than one: ‘prayers will be offered for my soul, as for that of one
dead, as for that of an infant dead in its dead mother, that it may not
go to Limbo’ (5:312).
As the speaker says in Text 11, ‘I am dead, but I never lived’
(11:333). One can only die if one has lived: what therefore does it
mean for one not to have lived and to have died? We will find our-
selves on familiar, if unstable, ground here when we read this sentence
back into the preceding novel: if this speaker in some ways is geneti-
cally related to the unnamable, it becomes clear that he, of course,
has not lived, because no fictional character ever lives. And thus we
133
come to yet another version of the fantasy of nonbeing: the fantasy

of being a character and, what will amount to the same thing, the
fantasy of being an author.
Dead characters/dead stories

In Text 10, the speaker, describing his state of being beyond ontology
says: ‘no souls, or bodies, or birth, or life, or death, you’ve got to go
on without any of that junk, that’s all dead with words, with excess
of words’ (10:329).3 The speaker seems here to imply that language is
never adequate to its task of describing the present state of (non)
being. But he also suggests that language is really all we have to
go on, all we have, in other words, to comprehend what cannot be
comprehended. These texts, to use a word that the speaker himself
uses frequently, are ‘impossible’: they describe the ‘impossible night’
(12:335) of temporality; the ‘impossible body’ (12:335) of the post-
human subject; the ‘impossible voice’ (11:334; 12:339) of that which
speaks about being unable to speak. And yet, this character, this
speaker, this function—and perhaps this is the best word to describe
the posthuman subject—is still animated by language, if only to be
buried under its ‘wordshit’ (9:325).
The posthuman subject animating these texts is acutely aware of
himself as a function of language, as speaking another’s words: ‘all
I say will be false and to begin with not said by me, here I’m a mere
ventriloquist’s dummy’ (8:321). Here the subject sees himself as an
observer of a life not quite his own, yet not quite removed from his
own: ‘I’m the clerk, I’m the scribe, at the hearings of what cause
I know not. Why want it to be mine, I don’t want it’ (5:309). Trapped
within what appears to be (at least in Text 5) a posthumous court-
room, the speaker writes about a life that has been (his own) and
upon which some kind of judgment is being passed:
That’s where the court sits this evening, in the depths of that vaulty
night, that’s where I’m clerk and scribe, not understanding what
I hear, not knowing what I write. That’s where the council will be
tomorrow, prayers will be offered for my soul, as for that of one
dead, as for that of an infant dead in its dead mother, that it may
not go to Limbo. (5:311)
The subject of Text 5 thus seems to be an author-figure of some

sort. And while it is possible to think of Texts for Nothing as having
134
a continuous speaker who bears the same voice across all thirteen
texts, this seems a massive assumption given Beckett’s obvious fasci-
nation with the idea of the fragmented subject. I wonder if one way
of thinking through the thorny complexities of these texts, complexi-
ties involving a dizzying switching between narrative and subjective
perspectives (sometimes within the same text), is via the idea that
Texts for Nothing is a series of monologues spoken by characters
aware of their author. What we have here, more precisely, is a presen-
tation of a series of monologues spoken by characters all meditating
on their status as characters and all, in some way, thinking about
their author/creator who, not accidentally of course, bears a sharp
resemblance to the fictionalized author-figure of The Unnamable.
I imagine Texts for Nothing, further—and here things get a bit
more complicated!—as texts spoken by characters who are aware
that they are characters, but who speak not necessarily the words of
their author. This is a massive complication: these texts are to be imag-
ined as if the characters, momentarily, could speak for themselves.
Some texts, as for instance, Text 4, see the subject thinking through
what it means to be a character in another’s text, wondering what it
would mean to achieve some kind of freedom from the tyranny
of the author: ‘Where would I go, if I could go, who would I be, if
I could be, what would I say, if I had a voice, who says this, saying it’s
me?’ (4:306). The subject here goes on to think about the author
function:
The truth is he looking for me to kill me, to have me dead like him,
dead like the living. He knows all that, but it’s no help his knowing
it, I don’t know it, I know nothing . . . He thinks words fail him,
he thinks because words fail him he’s on his way to my speechless-
ness, to being speechless with my speechlessness, he would like it
to be my fault that words fail him, of course words fail him. He
tells his story every five minutes, saying it is not his, there’s clever-
ness for you . . . If at least he would dignify me with the third
person, like his other figments, not he, he’ll be satisfied with noth-
ing less than me, for his me. (4:306–07)
We begin to realize that what this subject is referring to are the com-
plexities of the unnamable’s repeatedly stated position that he is not
the one speaking his own story. Text 4 works at once as a kind of
commentary on The Unnamable—as a harsh critique of the idea
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of the author repudiating his responsibilities for his words, his stories,
his characters (Molloy and Malone are in fact mentioned by name
[4:307])—and as an indication that we have moved beyond even the
unnamable’s position of radical passivity before the forces of a dis-
course which precedes and exceeds him. We now have moved beyond
the terminal narrative of The Unnamable into a series of texts that
fictionalize that already densely fictionalized and fictionalizing world.
What becomes clear thus is that each speaker of Texts for Nothing is
doubly spoken: he is a character within the imagination of another
character (the unnamable) who is himself being imagined by Beckett.
I wonder if that disturbing image of the baby dead within a dead
mother now becomes clear? Our speaker is a character within a char-
acter whose author is trying to write him into silent ‘inexistence’
(4:306).
‘Long live all our phantoms’

And thus, for this all to end, for silence to come to these doubled
speakers, language must fail on multiple levels, for multiple subjects,
multiple agencies. But knowing as we do that this is an impossibility,
that language cannot erase itself while speaking about that erasure
(we recall Malone Dies), these texts begin to take on the veneer of a
deep mourning, a mourning for the failure of language to end, an
impossible mourning for the subject who cannot die because his lan-
guage has not the sufficient strength to kill him. Being will not cease
because language, these ‘Vile words to make me believe I’m here’
(11:332), will not cease. In Text 8 the speaker describes his words
thusly:
And I should hear, at every little pause, if it’s the silence I say when
I say that only the words break it. But nothing of the kind, that’s
not how it is, it’s for ever the same murmur, flowing unbroken, like
a single endless word and therefore meaningless, for it’s the end
gives the meaning to words . . . But get on with the stupid old
threne . . . (8:320)
The speaker’s life has no meaning because it lacks an end (we

recall the Heideggerian notion that death is what gives meaning to
life because it gives life its final shape, its ultimate narrative pattern).
The speaker’s word ‘threne’ is crucial; it is a variation on the word
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‘threnody’, a song of lamentation. The speaker knows he is mourn-

ing, but this, like everything, is an impossible mourning because his
life cannot end, cannot even really be said to have begun, given
his overtly fictionalized status. But he still hopes for what he calls a
‘desinence’: ‘But it will end, a desinence will come, or the breath fail
better still, I’ll be silence’ (8:321). His desinence—the word means
‘grammatical ending’—will only come if the breath of the author will
fail; in this case the speaker needs the author-figure and, perhaps
Beckett himself, to die in order for his life to be over.4
We should, finally, make note of the last words of these strange,
deeply sad, texts: we should listen carefully to how Beckett signals an
end for what cannot ever really end (for how can the spectral subject
die? How can a phantom die being already dead?); we should attend to
how Beckett, perhaps against his own desire and best interests, signals
that the impossible voice continues even beyond itself, beyond its own
life and its own death. Texts for Nothing, as the final words of Text 13
make manifestly clear, should finally be read as series of impossible
epitaphs, crypt-markers enclosing what is dead yet cannot die:
And were the voice to cease quite at last, the old ceasing voice,
it would not be true, as it is not true that it speaks, it can’t speak,
it can’t cease. And were there one day to be here, where there are
no days, which is no place, born of the impossible voice the unmak-
able being, and a gleam of light, still all would be silent and empty
and dark, as now, as soon now, when all will be ended, all said, it
says, it murmurs. (13:339)
Notice how the desire for silence—and were the voice to cease—is
articulated only to be vitiated, emptied out, in the inevitable realiza-
tion that voice—the voice of the author, of character—cannot ever
speak itself into oblivion. To speak the unword, to cancel the self
within the protocols of speech and narrative—plainly: to speak the
end of speech—is an impossibility even, and perhaps especially,
within the space of death: ‘Long live all our phantoms’ (5:311).
THE SECOND TRILOGY

COMPANY
Thirty years come between Texts for Nothing and the so-called sec-
ond trilogy, Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho.5 In this period
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Beckett worked assiduously to decompose the protocols of prose

beyond the terminal points of the first trilogy, producing texts like
How It Is (1960), All Strange Away (1963–64), Imagination Dead
Imagine (1965), and Fizzles (1973–75). I read these texts as all con-
tributing to the overarching goal of the literature of the unword,
working as they do to unsettle readerly expectation of content and
genre. Indeed these texts at times read more like poetry than prose,
but to call them poetry is simply to fall into the temptation to classify
texts that are perhaps beyond generic classification. How for instance,
should we read these lines of How It Is?
past moments old dreams back again or fresh like those that
pass or things things always and memories I say them as I
hear them murmur them in the mud (411)
Where do we place our emphasis, imagine line markers and syntax to

be functioning? As always Beckett sunders genre, grammar, and syn-
tax, and in turn teaches us how to read all over again.6 But there is
something truly uncanny about Beckett’s late prose. As it becomes
less and less novelistic, as it verges away from the protocols of narra-
tive and even syntax, the emotions of the prose become more acutely
human; as the subject, the self, becomes more ghostly, spectral, fully
posthuman (if not posthumous: by now we must recognize how
Beckett empties the idea of ‘death’ of all meaning), the subject’s
world—his losses, terrors, his desolate sadness—becomes absolutely
recognizable and evokes a terrific, if not terrifying, sympathetic
response.
Solitude
Company, for instance, surely is one of the most powerful, moving
explorations of loneliness and aging in literature. And Beckett is clear
about what this text is ‘about’: it is about the need, desire, for com-
pany, for the presence of another being, an other, simply, who may
confirm one’s own desires, one’s own identity.7 It is, more precisely,
an enormously self-conscious meditation on one’s need for company.8
For, as it becomes apparent almost immediately, the subject in this
narrative is split into a variety of positions, selves, agencies: narrator,
hearer, and the voice who dictates the hearer’s memories to him. As
it splits the subject thus, Company externalizes memory, places it out-
side the subject, alienates it, questions it. What then is this situation
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where one’s memories are externalized? Is Company, like Texts

for Nothing, a meditation on the process of losing one’s memory?
A meditation on amnesia? An exploration of the disordered logic of
an Alzheimer’s sufferer? 9
Despite its manifest complications Company offers itself as unex-
pectedly readable, interpretable. It tracks the way in which an
individual, old, isolated, his mind drifting, meditates on the process
of inventing himself a companion: this companion, as becomes pain-
fully clear, is really his own former self dictating his own memories
back to him. The narrator puts it thusly:
Deviser of the voice and of its hearer and of himself. Deviser of

himself for company. Leave it at that. He speaks of himself as
of another. He says speaking of himself, He speaks of himself
as of another. Himself he devises too for company. (435)
The narrative thus modulates between the narrator thinking through

the logic of the mind working to assuage its own loneliness and the
voice presenting a variety of memories to the hearer who has no
choice but to listen. Obviously, there is something rather pathological
about all this: if the narrator, voice, and hearer, really do comprise a
single entity, we are presented with a subject shattered into (at least)
three elements, but who is absolutely aware of this process of discon-
tinuity. Perhaps more accurately, one aspect of his interior self—
the narrator proper—seems to have an awareness of the situation the
other aspects do not, or simply do not care to, acknowledge.
Most importantly, the hearer’s memories have been separated from
him: the narrator suggests at one point that the narrative is working
to have the hearer recognize these memories as his own: ‘To have the
hearer have a past and acknowledge it’ (438). What does this constel-
lation of subjectivities imply? At one level we are on familiar ground:
a subject who is disconnected from his past. This complex should
again remind us of the speaker of Texts for Nothing: ‘My past has
thrown me out’; we should also recall Mouth in Not I, who abso-
lutely refuses to acknowledge her past as being her own (or Krapp,
defiantly disavowing the emotional claims of his own past). But
Mouth denies her past out of absolute terror of a trauma that pre-
ceded her fall into the Symbolic realm of the social, of society itself.
Our subject here in Company, on the other hand, seems not to be
refusing to acknowledge his past, but is perhaps unable to do so.
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But there is one line in Company that problematizes things; the

narrator refers to the hearer as ‘devising figments to temper his noth-
ingness’ (443) as if the hearer is creating other subjectivities as a way
of strengthening his loneliness, his nothingness (‘to temper’ can mean
to make strong). Perhaps the narrator understands that the process
of creating company really only ever reinforces the solitude of the
creator given the manifest fictionality of the created being. And this
is where things get complex. On one hand we are back into Beckett’s
favorite thematic arena: the author meditating on the process of cre-
ating fictions.
But here in Company Beckett has taken this metafictional trope
and applied it directly to a single subject who is figured not necessar-
ily as an author of fictions (unlike, say, the narrator of The Unnamable,
or the speaker in Texts for Nothing who figures himself explicitly as a
‘scribe’). In other words, Beckett is now thinking about the idea that
all subjects, not only authors, are creators of fictions—memories,
pasts, histories—that serve only to temper solitude, nothingness.
Beckett’s Company here begins to ask some very difficult questions:
Who or what really is in control of our memories, and thus ourselves?
Do we, or does some other entity, create our pasts? If the past is a
creation, a fiction—a ‘fable’, to use the narrator’s own word—what
precisely is the truth value of our past and our present version of
ourselves?
These questions about memory should remind us of a similar
question posed in regard to language in The Unnamable. There we
explored the idea that the subject is subject to the language of a sys-
tem—Lacan would call it the register of the Symbolic—that precedes
and exceeds him: in this sense the subject is a created entity rather
than one who creates his world. In Company the narrator speaks
of the ‘Devised deviser devising it all for company’ (443): the subject
is a deviser in the sense that he in some ways constructs his own
(illusive) reality; he is devised in the sense that his notion of self is
dependant upon being communicated in the language of memory that
he himself does not control. The idea that language precedes and
exceeds the subject, while perhaps abstract, does make a kind of logi-
cal sense. What happens, however, when we begin to look at the idea
that memory precedes and exceeds the subject? What happens, pre-
cisely, when memory is externalized and alienated? We have above
considered that Company may be an extended analysis of illness, of
an illness like Alzheimer’s; perhaps the subject, like the subject in
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Texts, is suffering from some kind of trauma that has split him into
three constituent, yet alien, aspects of himself; perhaps Company
really is simply about the process of growing old (Beckett was in his
seventies when he wrote the text); perhaps with age comes a height-
ened sense of one’s memories as belonging to ‘another country’.10
Spectral subjects
I think these readings are all possible but I also think we need to pay
careful attention to the trajectory of Beckett’s career and keep in
mind that he is always working his way toward an effacement of the
subject, to an eradication of body and voice. Given this trajectory,
Company is a stop on the way to a kind of posthumanism, where the
subject, now sundered into many aspects, cannot with any degree of
certainty be called a subject. If, as we have been arguing throughout
this study, memory is what constructs the self, if memory allows the
subject to place himself within the stream of temporality—time and
history—we have here in Company, a subject divorced from his own
memory and thus one who cannot with any real comfort be called
a subject. I wish to be clear about this idea; I am not suggesting
that one suffering from memory loss—an amnesiac, an Alzheimer’s
patient—is not a person in the ethical, moral, or legal senses of the
term. I am suggesting that Beckett is centrally concerned with the
question of what makes a person in the philosophical sense of the term.
How precisely, he asks, are we expected to comprehend—to read,
interpret, and understand—the subject whose memories are not his
own? The subject without memory?
My own suggestion is we are again encountering a version of the
spectral subject, the subject who, if not dead in this case, lives far
from memory and thus far from what creates him as fully present to
his own life. But this is a position, while at some level surely desirable
in as much as it creates the illusion of company, that the narrator
realizes cannot be sustained (to be specter to one’s own life must
surely be one definition of madness). To maintain oneself on the lim-
its of the human—recall our definition of the posthuman: to exist at
the limits—places a burden upon the resources that sustain that illu-
sion: the imagination and its adjunct, language: ‘Huddled thus you
find yourself imagining you are not alone while knowing full well
that nothing has occurred to make this possible. The process contin-
ues none the less lapped as it were in its meaninglessness’ (449).Where
language fails, the illusion of the past divorced from the hearer will
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concomitantly fail. This acknowledgment must, inevitably, painfully,

reconstruct the subject in his absolute solitude: loneliness is the fero-
cious price the acknowledgment of history demands. By forgoing the
illusion of company—that is, by refusing the comfort of a plural self
in his fictions, his ‘fable’ (450)—the subject coheres into an absolute
solitude, as the final lines make clear:
Till finally you hear how words are coming to an end. With every
inane word a little nearer to the end. And how the fable too. The
fable of one with you in the dark. The fable of one fabling of one
with you in the dark. And how better in the end labour lost and
silence. And you as you always were. Alone. (450)
These final lines, with their repudiation of the power of language—

the fable—to sustain the illusion of plurality, recalls us to the familiar
Beckett trope: failure, here, precisely, the failure of desire. Like Malone’s
stories, which fail as play, fail to erase the self, the subject’s fables here
fail to sustain the illusion of company and thus only ever serve to
temper a nothingness within which the self will forever remain, desir-
ing what can only ever remain impossible.
But can a self coherent in its singular loneliness, a self no longer
able to hallucinate its own discontinuity, be called a posthuman sub-
ject any longer? Our subject has arrived at a painful realization of its
own continuity, its own singularity: it really does not exist at any kind
of limit where its memories precede him from another source. We
may, simply as a parting aporetic observation notice, however, that it
is still the voice that dictates this failure to the hearer: ‘you as you
always were’. Fables may fail to sustain the illusion of company but
some remnant, some trace, of company—of some posthuman frag-
mentation of interiority—surely is always present in the mind which,
as for all minds, reflects upon itself if only to be reminded of what it
cannot ever attain.
ILL SEEN ILL SAID

The image (2)
As we read Ill Seen Ill Said and take note of its structure—in this
case its nonlinear, nonnarrative structure—we may, perhaps should,
recall the trajectory of Beckett’s drama from plays with (more or less)
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embodied characters to plays that operate only as a pretext for a

dominating image (Not I, Play, Happy Days). Beckett’s drama attempts
to pare down the presence of the human—and recognizable human
drama—in favor of an image that characterizes the integral element
of the subject: a mouth, a head in an urn, a body, embedded in dirt.
Beckett is doing something related in his final prose. He is removing
all claims to narrative—story, character, plot, even the syntax of a
language that would support these things—in favor of a dominating
series of images, or even mood. It is true that the earlier prose began
removing the conventions of narrative but even in the radical experi-
ments of the first trilogy—and I would argue even up until Company—
we have a sense that syntax, grammar, and language, if failing, were
still, in a way, functioning to reflect a subjectivity that we somehow
could recognize as failing.
In texts like Ill Seen Ill Said or Worstward Ho Beckett moves into a
language and narrative form that approaches a deadly stillness, where
a voice dictates—paints, almost—the vague parameters of the sub-
ject from an almost inhuman distance. Beckett here shatters his prose
into discrete short paragraphs and fragmented phrases that work
effectively to deny the very idea of a continuous narrative, or contin-
uous subjectivity: as the subject becomes a ghost, the language
describing the ghost itself is spectralized, becomes only a trace of
what it once was. No real stories, no identifiable memories are easily
linked back to the human subject: she is radically silent, spectrally
still, possessing the imagistic quality of a series of photographs.11
To speak of plot in relation to this text thus is an absurdity. We
must rather speak of what images are presented to us: an old woman
alone in an isolated cabin; the same woman at a gravesite; the woman
watched by twelve real, imagined, or dead figures; the woman watched
by a single man who may or may not be the ghost of her dead hus-
band; the woman pursued by an eye, a witness to her solitude. This
woman, the narrative voice tells us, is dead—‘of course she is’ (464)—
but for the purposes of this story it is ‘more convenient’(464) that she
remain alive to have ‘the misfortune to be still of this world’ (453).
Thus, she is alive and not alive; she exists at the whim of narrator
who needs her to ‘be’ in order to accomplish some task.
And we should be clear that the narrator is aware, and communi-
cates this awareness, that he is able to manipulate this figure for his
own purposes ‘Have her sit? Lie? Kneel? Go?’ (466); but he also
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makes clear that this is not a fiction, even as he highlights his func-
tion as an author and authority figure:
Already all confusion. Things and imaginings. As of always.

Confusion amounting to nothing. Despite precautions. If only she
could be pure figment. Unalloyed . . . . If only all could be pure
figment. Neither be nor been nor by any shift to be. (456)
Yet later he adds: ‘Not possible any longer except as figment. Not
endurable’ (459). I wonder if this expression of a desire to move
beyond the real into fiction is the narrator’s way of expressing a kind
of compassion for the reality of this woman and her suffering, a way
of displacing and disavowing a suffering for which he, as author, is
responsible. And certainly there is an element of cruelty to this story
that speaks to the element of cruelty in all fictions, all creations: the
author is bringing a subject into being and placing her, ‘throwing’ her,
to borrow again from Heidegger, into a world not of her choosing.
Seeing badly/witnessing badly

And our narrator admits further that his representation, and here we
look to the title of the narrative, is ineffective: the events are ill seen
and ill said, badly witnessed, badly represented. The narrator several
times draws our attention to the fact that words are not adequate to
his task of representing this woman: ‘what the wrong word?’ (454;
455; 470) he asks. And this text is all about representing things seen:
it thus, and here we may recall the thematic of Watt, is all about wit-
nessing, ineffective witnessing, cruel witnessing. Recall that this
woman is being watched by at least three constituencies: twelve fig-
ures, a man, an eye. These witnesses recall us to a primary theme in
Beckett, one traced through the drama and the fiction (and indeed
into Film) and summed up perfectly in a line from Play: ‘Am I as
much as being seen?’ Do I exist solely because of the gaze of the
Other? The Other’s gaze thus, like the author’s imagination, brings
the subject into being and, as we previously discussed, this is an oner-
ous responsibility, given the fact—and this is a central concern in
Endgame—that characters often wish not to be in the world that is
witnessed into being on their behalf.
In Ill Seen Ill Said, however, Beckett complicates things somewhat.
First he suggests that the woman has a degree of power over her
viewers: ‘She shows herself only to her own’ (453) the narrator says,
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implying that she chooses to display herself within a context of the

familiar; perhaps she only shows herself to the specters, the spectral
witnesses, of her own past. But the narrator moves on to say ‘But she
has no own. Yes yes she has one. And who has her’ (453). This line,
puzzling, suggests a myriad of readings. This ‘one’ may be the specter
of her lost husband; the ‘one’ may be herself (we are reminded of the
logic of solitude in Company, how loneliness leads to the creation of
Others by the self); the ‘one’ may be the author calling her into being;
the ‘one’ may in fact be you, the reader, who conjures her in your own
imagination.12 The narrator makes clear that the woman’s audience
may be under her control to a degree by suggesting that all her view-
ers, but perhaps primarily the male viewer, are imaginary: the narrative
voice refers to him as ‘the imaginary stranger’ (453). Perhaps she, like
the subject in Company, is imagining herself pursued by ghosts of
a past long dead but conjured into being once more: and thus the
text becomes another melancholy meditation on the economy of
loneliness.
The seeing eye

But there is more happening here. Beckett is not only concerned with
tracing the economy of loneliness in a solitary figure; he is not, that
is, only observing how the subject conjures specters for company. He
is interested in what can be called, perhaps paradoxically, the life of
the specter. If the subject needs to be witnessed in order to exist (even
against her will) the witness also needs to watch. On one hand, from
the perspective of the subject being witnessed, to be is to be per-
ceived; from the specter’s perspective, however, to be is to perceive. To
be precise, to be is to be unable not to perceive, not to gaze, not to
watch. As Ill Seen Ill Said proceeds it becomes clear that our atten-
tion is being drawn as much to the eye as to the woman. It becomes
clear, moreover, that the eye really has the power to perceive this
world—including this woman—into existence, into being.
Late in the text the narrator describes again the woman’s cabin; it
seems to have changed for the worse, but oddly not to have altered in
any fundamental way: ‘When all worse there than when first ill seen.
The pallet. The chair. The coffer. The trap. Alone the eye has changed.
Alone can cause to change’ (468). This is a crucial line indicating as
it does that the eye has the power to alter the reality of this reduced,
denuded, world. The power to perceive is the power to alter the real-
ity of things. And yet, for all its power, the eye is still dependent on
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the world it creates, is still tied (and we recall Beckett’s fascination

with the economy of these terrible bindings [Lucky/Pozzo; Vladimir/
Estragon]) to the world it simultaneously creates and haunts.
The penultimate paragraph of Ill Seen Ill Said makes this clear: the
woman seems to have disappeared, perhaps having undergone some
kind of burial, self-burial, or death: ‘Alone the face remains. Of the
rest beneath its covering no trace’ (469); the eye is left to perceive or
create an absent world and the narrator ruminates on the link between
the eye and this emptiness:
Absence supreme good and yet. Illumination then go again and

on return no more trace. On earth’s face. Of what was never. And
if by mishap some left then go again. For good again. So on. Till
no more trace. On earth’s face. Instead of always in the same place.
Slaving away forever in the same place. At this and that trace. And
what if the eye could not? No more tear itself away from the
remains of trace. Of what was never. Quick say it suddenly can
and farewell say say farewell. If only to the face. Of her tenacious
face. (470)
In some sense this paragraph presents in miniature the trajectory of

Beckett’s entire career as a writer. If this eye can be allegorized as the
author perceiving the world into being, here the eye is figured as
working toward the eradication of the human from that world: if
some trace of things remains, the narrator says, the eye will come and
effect its erasure ‘Till no more trace’.
Beckett’s career has been working toward a kind of posthuman
position as well, dismantling the subject and the subject’s language
until only traces of it remain, specters of broken grammars support-
ing broken people. But, the narrator asks, what if the eye cannot tear
itself away from the remains of the human, what if the eye, like Beckett,
is continually haunted by, just as he haunts, the specter of the human
‘Slaving away forever in the same place’? This idea seems terrible to
the narrator and so: ‘Quick say it suddenly can and farewell say say
farewell. If only to the face. Of her tenacious face’. The face that
Beckett, like Levinas, knows is the seat of the human, the place of the
essence of what makes us human, is tenacious and will remain if only
in trace, ‘drawn by a phantom hand’ (470), asserting itself to the eye,
to Beckett, to us all. There is a desire for the eye, for Beckett, to eradi-
cate the face, all traces of the human ‘Sky earth the whole kit and
146
boodle’ (470), but the human persists if only in spectral form, if only
as a trace animating the very writing, the very witnessing, that testi-
fies to its stubborn persistence.13
WORSTWARD HO
In some ways Beckett’s career as a prose writer, perhaps a writer
altogether, finds its terminus in Worstward Ho. I have been arguing
that since 1937 Beckett has been searching for the means to move
beyond conventional literary discourse, beyond, perhaps, even lan-
guage itself. Part of our trajectory, therefore, has been to explore
how for Beckett language is intimately tied up with being: in simple
terms, language is what makes the human; language supports
being. A hypothesis follows: if you dismantle language, if you find
what Beckett calls the ‘literature of unword’, perhaps then you also
dismantle the human, or at least you dismantle one avenue into
understanding the human qua human. Thus we have asked questions:
what would it mean to be without language? Without memory? As
Beckett became interested in separating the human subject from its
memories and its language he also altered our conception of the
human: we have therefore begun speaking of the posthuman, that
agency existing on the very limits of what we can comprehend and
understand.
Worstward Ho, though not Beckett’s final prose work (that is 1988s
Stirrings Still), is the most fully realized attempt to articulate a lan-
guage that refuses to support and reflect a recognizably human world,
a language that barely can function as a language at all. This is a text,
therefore, that I wish to characterize as moving as closely as possible
to Beckett’s goal of the literature of the unword. In The German
Letter Beckett expresses boredom with the literary conventions of
‘Grammar and Style’ (171): Worstward Ho will work toward their
cancellation; in the Letter he expresses an unease with the very idea
of language as such: ‘As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we
should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its fall-
ing into disrepute’ (172): Worstward Ho will do its best to cancel
language’s claims to represent experience and the world by dissolving
the very ‘materiality of the word surface’ (172); in the Letter Beckett
expresses the desire, the paradoxical, impossible, desire, to reach the
‘literature of the unword’: Worstward Ho, in its radical decomposi-
tion of grammar, style, syntax, and story comes as close as we can to
147
a literature that seems to erase itself as it proceeds. But, and here is

the paradox, it is still a literature, it is still a language: the unword,
despite its threatened erasure, is still a word.
The least an author can do

The content of this late text is simple enough. A narrator posits a
series of figures: a solitary figure, a man and a boy, a man with his
head in his hands. The narrative describes how these figures come
into being in terms that make it clear that Worstward Ho is yet another
meditation on the author’s creative responsibility. These figures are
posited, but as pure figments, pure fictions, in a language barely able,
or willing, to sustain them. Thus:
Say a body. Where none. No mind. Where none. That at least.

A place. Where none. For the body. To be in. Move in. Out of.
Back into. No. No out. No back. Only in. Stay in. On in. Still.
All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter.
Try again. Fail again. Fail better. (471)
These famous opening lines contain the maximum compression of

parody, for surely Beckett, through a language literally fragmented, is
saying something like this: As an author I must posit a subject, a
character, and a space within which this character may ‘exist’. This
attempt, I acknowledge, will fail and will fail perhaps more glori-
ously than before (we note with wry amusement how failure becomes
a category of a kind of perverse success in Beckett). Surely here we
are reminded of Malone’s attempt to tell his four stories: and per-
haps Malone Dies is what the narrator is referring to with ‘All of old’.
But where Malone hoped to succeed in his literary play by cancelling
himself, our narrator here wishes to posit his figures only in an
attempt to imagine the worst possibility for them: the title here is the
narrator’s rallying cry to himself: Worstward Ho!14
And as a crucial first step into this exploration of the worst, the
narrator asks: What is the least I have to give my human characters
in order for them to experience the worst that is possible? What is the
‘mere minimum’ (472) of language, of body, of interiority required
of the human for it to register its position within this ill-defined
‘beyondless’ (473) space? (and what a perfect word for the idea of the
posthuman limit: beyondless). The narrator seems to desire to give his
figures only those characteristics that would define them as minimally
148
present. This requirement seems to be the capacity to feel pain and

here perhaps is Beckett’s essential definition of what it means to be
(post)human:
It stands. What? Yes. Say it stands. Had to up in the end and stand.
Say bones. No bones but say bones. Say ground. No ground but
say ground. So as to say pain. No mind and pain? Say yes that the
bones may pain till no choice but to stand. Somehow up and
stand. Or better worse remains. Say remains of mind where none
to permit of pain. Pain of bones till no choice but up and stand.
Somehow up. Somehow stand. Remains of mind where none for
the sake of pain. Here of bones. Other examples if needs must. Of
pain. Relief from. Change of. (471–72)
I read into this paragraph two resonances typical of Beckett. First,

there is a frustration in the fact that the human must be involved in
this narrative at all: surely after all these years of searching there
must be a way of creating narrative without the interference of, or
interest in, the human, a narrative without a subject, as it were. Second,
the narrator’s careful articulation of the least possible evinces a real
compassion for the subject that he seems simultaneously to despise.
The figures in Worstward Ho are what Slavoj Zizek would call the
‘indivisible remainder’: the leftovers, the aftermath, of the effort to
eliminate the human, its ontology, its claims to subjectivity. The human,
in other words, cannot ever be effaced in Beckett and because of this
it seems to stake an emotional (if not ethical) claim on the narrator.
Failing words
And of course immediately attending this impossible attempt to efface
the human is the desire to remove the claims of language as such, to
call it into ‘disrepute’ as a means perhaps to snuff out the human once
and for all. If the linguistic means of representing the human are not
available perhaps the human will cease to be, cease to assert claims
on the author. Beckett signals his language’s fragility, its essential
weakness, in a number of ways in Worstward Ho. He will at times
have his narrator simply give up on a sentence as if the effort to con-
tinue is too much or as if language simply cannot do its job: ‘The
void. How try say? How try fail? No try no fail. Say only—’ (474);
‘The eyes. Time to—’ (478); ‘Worst in need of worse. Worse in—’
(479). The dashes here represent what cannot be represented (just as
149
the blank space on the final page of Malone’s narrative attempts to

represent the space of death, a space beyond language).
The narrator acknowledges from the beginning that what will be
communicated here will always ever be inaccurate, a misspeaking of
sorts: ‘Say for be said. Missaid. From now say for be missaid’ (471);
he speaks of ‘worsening words’ (478) which cannot be traced back to
an origin and whose authority thus cannot ever be guaranteed:
Worsening words whose unknown. Whence unknown. At all costs

unknown. Now for to say as worst they may only they only they.
Dim void shades all they. Nothing save what they say. Somehow
say. Nothing save they. What they say. Whosesoever whencesoever
say. As worst they may fail ever worse to say. (478)
Language itself has become spectral, ‘void shades’: as such what

language proposes to represent can only ever be spectral, can only
claim a moment’s ineffable existence as a figment in the mind of an
author. It is crucial here then that the narrator posits another figure
in the story who seems to be a representative of the author. The nar-
rator posits a ‘Head sunk on crippled hands . . . Eyes clenched. Seat
of all. Germ of all’ (472).15 We are invited to read this posited figure
as imagining what we see in Worstward Ho and thus to trace the text’s
language back to him and stabilize it. But no sooner is this figure
posited then he is effaced, is figured in his turn as always already
spectral, always already failing to imagine fully: ‘No future in this.
Alas yes . . . Shades with the other shades’ (472; 475).
How, the narrator asks, can an author be the source of the story
and a part of the story?16 He cannot be, and thus as soon as the central
narrator, the central author, imagines his own double in his story, he—
is this possibly Beckett?—in his turn becomes spectral: where before
characters were specters, where language becomes spectral, now the
author himself is a ghost haunting his narrative both from within and
from without. Eliminating the author is perhaps Beckett’s last attempt
to eliminate language, his own language, once and for all:
On back better worse to fail the head said seat of all. Germ of all?
All? If of all of it too. Where if not there it too? There in the
sunken head the sunken head. The hands. The eyes. Shade with
the other shades. In the same dim. The same narrow void. (475)
150
What then is the worst? What does it mean to be within the worst?
The text does not, perhaps as we may expect, tell us explicitly, but
from what I have been suggesting the worst perhaps is the fact of
being here as the ‘indivisible remainder’, the specter who cannot ever
vanish. The worst is to be conjured into a world where pain is the
only symptom of your humanity and where even the knowledge of
the fictionality of things provides no comfort given that the author
too—the seat and germ of all—is now in this ‘hellish half light’ (Play)
suffering alongside his creation.
Desire and the posthuman

But perhaps what is really worse than this already terrible position is
that a desire for this to be over articulates itself in the midst of this
pain. We may recall Freud’s theory of the death drive: ‘the aim of all
life is death’ (311). The goal is to return to the state of nonbeing that
preceded life. A similar trajectory is posited in Worstward Ho: a
desire, and needless to say an impossible desire, for it all to be over,
that ‘all go’ (481). But notice how this longing for the end is simulta-
neously a longing, a desire, for longing itself: Beckett seems to posit
that perhaps the worst condition of the human is to be in state of
desire for desire itself. Here then are perhaps the most important lines
in Beckett:
Longing the so-said mind long lost to longing. The so-missaid. So

far so-missaid. Dint of long longing lost to longing. Long vain
longing. And longing still. Faintly longing still. Faintly vainly
longing still. For fainter still. For faintest. Faintly vainly longing
for the least of longing. Unlessenable least of longing. Unstillable
vain last of longing still.
Longing that all go. Dim go. Void go. Longing go. Vain longing
that vain longing go. (481)
I read this passage as reflective of a larger condition of the post-

human and a cancellation, perhaps, of that condition: even as the
mere minimum is given to the subject in order for it to register the
worst of things, desire inevitably emerges as the ultimate indivisible
remainder, a thing that cannot ever be removed fully and which forces
the subject to imagine the possibilities beyond its limited scope.
Desire becomes the thing which perhaps threatens once again to
151
animate the subject as fully, rather than post, human. And the desire
is complex: it is the desire to go, to end, to die. It is, however, also
the desire that acknowledges that it is vain, empty, impossible. An
impossible desire to end is still a desire, however, and thus the terrible
line: ‘Vain longing that vain longing go’. The subject now wishes that
the impossible desire to end itself will vanish. But notice how this
desire simply works to remind the subject just how invested he is in
this world.
It is of course difficult to locate the source of this desire in Worst-
ward Ho: is it the figures themselves (the old man and boy) who wish
to go, who wish for desire to end? Is it perhaps the head-clasped
author-figure, the seat and germ of all, who is imagining this? The
text seems to suggest a link between the one who imagines this world
into being and the possibility that he may efface that very world:
‘Back unsay better worse by no stretch more . . . Ooze back try worsen
blanks. Those then when nohow on. Unsay then all gone. All not
gone’ (481–82). Yet even as the author-figure imagines the possibility
of erasing his work—‘unsay then all gone’—he realizes that nothing
can eliminate this world, this creation, this expression of minimal
desire: ‘All not gone’.
‘Nohow naught’
In the final lines of Worstward Ho we read: ‘Nothing to show a child
and yet a child. A man and yet a man’ (484); having rather arbitrarily
brought in a female figure (who reminds us of the woman from Ill
Seen Ill Said) the narrative proceeds: ‘Nothing and yet a woman’
(484). There is nothing, and nothing to say, and yet from this void
something inevitably emerges even at a minimal level, ‘Never to be
naught’ (484). ‘Nothing is more real than nothing’, Beckett once
wrote and yet the desire to efface that nothing, to unsay the nothing,
can only ever produce the traces of that attempt, can only ever create
anew the process: unsaying is still a saying by which nothing emerges
to stake a claim on the real. Worstward Ho thus emerges ultimately as
a commentary on Beckett’s own desires as an author to eliminate lit-
erary language as such. For surely the desire to eliminate language
can only be expressed within language ‘Worsening words whose
unknown’ (478): and thus the very attempt to efface language inscribes
language if only as something to be, in its turn, dismantled. But to do
so, to posit a language to be effaced, is still to posit language: longing,
desire, thus always work to reinscribe the very thing the author wishes
152
to be gone. That desire itself is ‘unstillable’, vain, impossible. Desire

forces language, like a revenant, back to what has been and what will
always be: the spectral subject (author or character: but in Beckett’s
late text is there any discernable difference?) who, a ghost to itself, to
its own life, its own text, is never fully gone, never fully will be gone:
‘Shades cannot go’ (482).
153
CHAPTER 7
CONCLUSION
We can bear neither the void, nor the secret.

—Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime
THE AESTHETICS OF SUFFERING

In his 1931 study of the work of Marcel Proust, Beckett suggests that
habit conditions the human subject to the world. Habit masks the
reality of things—despair, loss, pain—and allows us to live in a state
of relative equanimity. Indeed, for Beckett almost every experience is
mediated through habit: all our reactions to things, good or bad, are
habitual which means that we spend very little time actually thinking
about our experience of the world. We live radically blinkered to
what Lacan would call the Real, that register of ever-present trauma
that underpins all experience. Here is Beckett: ‘Habit is the ballast
that chains the dog to its vomit. Breathing is habit. Life is habit. Or
rather a succession of habits, since the individual is a succession of
individuals’ (515). Habit, Beckett continues, is basically the default
emotional and intellectual register of the human but our experience
of habit is one mediated by two related states: suffering and bore-
dom. The state of boredom, ‘the most tolerable because the most
durable of human evils’ (520), is where most humans find themselves
most of the time: boredom is really simply an adjunct of habit.
Breaking through the gloom of habit and boredom, however, is
suffering, the ‘omission of [the] duty’ to habit (520). Suffering, Beckett
writes, ‘opens a window on the real’ (520). And while Beckett’s lan-
guage is not quite Lacan’s (or not yet quite like Lacan’s) the idea that
suffering reveals the Real to us is a crucial one, not least because
Beckett figures suffering as ‘the main condition of the artistic
154
CONCLUSION
experience’ (520). Now Beckett’s phrase here is crucial: ‘the main

condition of the artistic experience’ refers both to the condition of
the artist—to create is to suffer—and to the experience of that art by
the reader or viewer: to witness is to suffer, to interpret that which
resists interpretation is also to suffer. Suffering thus is the condition
of the creation of art and the experience of that art. Beckett may
repudiate suffering, may suggest that suffering is to be avoided, but
he also valorizes suffering precisely because it reveals the truth of
experience to us.
We have been speaking here about a variety of suffering in Beckett’s
work: the painful consciousness of being bound by and to ideas not
necessarily of our own choosing (Waiting for Godot); the conscious-
ness of one’s painful relation to history (Endgame; Not I; Play); the
consciousness of opportunity deliberately rejected (Krapp’s Last
Tape); the consciousness of the self decomposing (Molloy); the con-
sciousness of the inability of ever fully effacing the self (Malone
Dies); the painful awareness that, even in death, history and desire
continue to haunt the subject (The Unnamable; The Second Trilogy).
Self-consciousness, which really does translate in Beckett to a radical
state of anxiety, underpins a great deal of his work and, to speak
plainly, is what is important about his work. Anxiety, pain, and suf-
fering are crucial because for Beckett they reveal what is important,
what is true about the human: pain reveals what the human can
endure and thus what ultimately comprises and defines the human.
We are, in other words, the sum of our pain. Knowing the economies
of the losses that make the human, knowing how loss defines the
human and how the human in turn responds to loss, is one way of
approaching the complexity of the human animal.
Beckett, for all his interest in the limits of the human, in what
I have been calling the posthuman, thus really does remain funda-
mentally a humanist. Indeed, the trajectory of his career demonstrates
that posthumanism, defined in a limited sense as the elimination of
the human—its body; its claims to a transparent consciousness—is a
patent impossibility: traces of the human, of the (spectral) body, of
(spectral) desires, insistently reanimate what seems to have vanished.
I say Beckett remains fundamentally a humanist, but this state-
ment needs qualification. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say
that Beckett is a reluctant humanist and remains one despite his own
wishes. If my suggestion that Beckett has, since 1937, been attempting
to decompose language, to find a literature of the unword, is correct;
155
if my suggestion that language in Beckett consistently defines the

human is also correct; and if I am right to notice how the human in
Beckett is consistently a speaking subject (even after death); then we
must acknowledge that Beckett’s career is an extraordinarily complex
kind of failure. Because this concerted and at times violent attempt to
eliminate language and the human only serves to fetishize the object
being vilified. A career attempting to efface language and the human
is really a career speaking of language’s absolute and remorseless cen-
trality; the human always remains, as I have been suggesting, if only as
phantom, as trace, as specter. Concomitantly, the language animating
that trace itself is never fully eliminated despite a logical and ruthless
trajectory toward the ‘worsening words’ of the late texts. Perhaps the
simplest way to express this complexity is thus: the human remains—
as human remains—despite Beckett’s best efforts to eliminate it.
Beckett therefore does emerge as a peculiar artist indeed. He is a
writer who wishes to eliminate the very thing—language—which
defines him vocationally, and if the themes of his work reflect into his
own world, as a human: in a way it is accurate to suggest that Beckett’s
career is a kind of sixty-year suicide attempt. And surely this distrust
of language and writing must inform the reading of his work, must
in some ways shape our response. Surely Beckett’s oft-stated hatred
of the writing process must account for the radically self-conscious
nature of the work.1 And, as I have been suggesting, the work’s self-
consciousness serves crucially to activate our awareness of our own
position as readers of these texts. When Clov, for instance, directly
indicates the audience ‘I see . . . a multitude . . . in transports . . . of
joy’; or when Malone interrupts his narrative with ‘what tedium’
(a sentiment the reader herself might be sharing at precisely the same
point!), we are forced to reflect on what is at stake in our response to
these uncanny wor(l)ds of suffering. This is all to say that Beckett’s
interest in what I am calling the aesthetics of suffering must force
us—and perhaps especially any scholar who spends a great deal of
time thinking about Beckett—to ask a difficult question: why do we,
as readers, enter Beckett’s disconcerting world?
THE RESISTANT TEXT

It is clearly not for reasons we may enter into other texts and narra-
tives. We are not reading Beckett for an easy escape from the world;
indeed, as I argued in my reading of Murphy, Beckett’s writing works
156
CONCLUSION
only to remind us of the reality of our own world. Difficulty is part

of the economy of reading Beckett’s work: difficulty of subject matter,
but also difficulty of reading itself. Who, struggling through the tor-
tured syntax of Worstward Ho, is ever fully lost to himself, lost in the
way he might be in an Auster or McEwan or Murakami novel? Who,
reading those seemingly interminable paragraphs of The Unnamable
is not tempted to skip a few lines here and there? (I of course never am.)
One must be dedicated and disciplined to read Beckett well; one must,
ideally, read at most a page at a time, linger over the various reso-
nances of sentences, contemplate at length the darkly humorous pain
the text offers. But this is not yet to answer my question: why do we
enter into this difficulty, this perplexity? What is to be gained, speak-
ing of economics, by this experience, an experience that becomes a
kind of interpretive suffering?
I want to approach this question in two ways by returning, per-
haps predictably, to Beckett’s German Letter and to a sentence I have
to this point passed over. After speaking of his desire to discover this
literature of the unword Beckett writes: ‘An assault against words in
the name of beauty’ (173). I have, over the course of years of teach-
ing Beckett, often been asked about my obsession with such a ‘dark’
and ‘depressing’ author. After explaining that I find his work uplift-
ing rather than depressing (and after receiving some odds looks:
I usually am teaching Malone Dies at this point; and what, my stu-
dents correctly ask, is uplifting in a story about a man paralyzed,
dying, and telling feeble stories?), I explain that there is something
beautiful about Beckett’s world, that his assault on conventions of
genre and traditionally held—thus comforting—notions about the
nature of language (that it, for instance, is ours to wield as we see fit)
is all done in the name of beauty. It follows then that I must explain
the nature of Beckett’s beauty.
I believe that Beckett’s work is beautiful—and here I run danger-
ously close to displaying an untheorized Romanticism—because it is
unavoidably true. This position of witnessing the decay of the body,
of witnessing the insistent continuity of desire and memory—of desire
as memory—is where we all will be, sooner or later: that is to say,
Beckett’s work anticipates a state of the human which is inevitable.
We may not all become Malone, or M, W1, or W2 of Play, or Mouth
of Not I, but who can claim not to have encountered a version of
these types, obsessed with their pasts, disavowing what is so patently
and obviously true?
157
Beckett decided early in his career (it was 1945, while staying with
his ailing mother in Foxrock) that his subject matter would be one of
darkness rather than light. Beckett’s revelation, that his own igno-
rance, impotence, and ‘stupidity’ (319), as he put it to his biographer
James Knowlson, were valid subject matter for artistic exploration,
leads quite logically to an interest in failure, the extremity of knowl-
edge, the spectral and suffering subject. And this fascination with the
specter, the ‘mere minimum’ of the human, with its suffering, becomes
beautiful to the degree that Beckett commits himself fully to facing that
pain unflinchingly, honestly, without sentiment, and without giving
way to hope or easy despair. I mentioned in my Introduction that
Beckett’s work is difficult because the world he depicts is difficult to
bear. I also suggested that Beckett’s work maps out a trajectory of
real artistic courage: what is more courageous—and is not courage
always beautiful?—than facing the worst we can imagine?
A second aspect to what I am calling the beauty of Beckett’s
world is its manifest complexity. We are consistently confronted with
images and ideas which resist an easy reading: is the speaker of Texts
for Nothing alive, dead, or, confoundingly, both? Why is Winnie bur-
ied in the earth? Why is Mouth so physically reduced? Does Murphy
kill himself or is he a victim of an accident? Is Watt simply insane
or is it possible that Knott really does change appearance from
one moment to the next? I have offered tentative responses to these
questions but will assert here that my readings are only ever provi-
sional: that is to say, they are open to interpretation and challenge.
In this way I make clear that I am never fully satisfied, indeed never
should be, with any reading. Perhaps another way of putting this
is that Beckett’s texts resist interpretation insofar as they offer differ-
ent meanings at different stages of the interpreter’s reading life. My
reading of Beckett when I was twenty-eight is not quite the same as
it is when I am forty. This is of course true for the reading of any
author but with a writer such as Beckett—one whose work is mobi-
lized precisely around issues of aging, decay, and death—it seems
especially so.
CODA: ‘NEITHER’
One will never exhaust the possible interpretations of Beckett’s work
and thus it remains—in all senses of the term—a site of continual
attraction and beauty. To conclude this study I wish to offer an example
158
CONCLUSION
of a resistant text, one which has haunted me for years precisely

because it confounds any obvious reading. Beckett wrote ‘neither’ for
American composer Morton Feldman in 19762; it was first published
in the Journal of Beckett Studies in 1979. Stanley Gontarski includes
the piece in his edition of The Complete Short Prose, but one could
easily argue that ‘neither’ is a poem. Like How It Is, or even the texts
comprising the late trilogy, this piece defies generic classification.
I quote the text in full:
To and fro in shadow from inner to outershadow

from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither
as between two lit refuges whose doors once neared gently close,
once turned away from gently part again
beckoned back and forth and turned away
heedless of the way, intent on the one gleam or the other
unheard footfalls only sound
till at last halt for good, absent for good from self and other
then no sound
then gently light unfading on that unheeded neither
unspeakable home. (425)
Perhaps the first thing we notice about this text is the absence of a
readily identifiable subject and of any action (indeed there are no
verbs in the first lines): just who is the one ‘moving’ (notice how
I have to posit my own verb!) from inner to outer shadow? Beckett
omits the grammatical marker of agency here which leaves us with a
curiously suspended state of action or being. The poem seems, that
is, to occur to no one, seems to reflect no one’s state of mind; perhaps
more accurately, the ‘action’ seems to occur by its own volition.
We may here recall Blanchot’s notion of subjectivity without a
subject, for surely we have here a case of a complex psychological
state taking place in the seeming absence of any subject. And while
Beckett does use the word ‘self’ we notice that the self is impenetrable
and, moreover, moves to its opposite, the ‘unself’. If we imagine, per-
haps, that the self has moved from itself to its opposite—but what
does that mean? Has it united with its other? Another person? Its
own death? Its absence of itself ?—this movement is initiated by nei-
ther the self nor the unself: it is motivated by something else entirely.
We are reminded of the idea that agency is always ever dictated by
some extra-subjective force. We have here the state of the ‘neither’,
159
a kind of neutral space, of not being one thing nor another, which
seems to dictate the action or movement.
The third line attempts to concretize this abstract idea of move-
ment, or transition (perhaps to death) via the metaphor of the door
which closes when approached and opens when one moves away; the
door is an image of the liminal, the transition from one state to
another but here the threshold cannot readily be achieved: the self is
‘beckoned back and forth and turned away’. And notice again how
the subject is in a state of passivity here, receiving the beckoning
and being actively turned away. We are left, again, with the self in a
kind of suspended animation, in a liminal space which cannot be left
behind: the self, in one reading, is neither one thing nor another, per-
haps neither alive nor dead. Perhaps we have here, in miniature,
another representation of the spectral ontology of the unnamable or
the speakers of Texts for Nothing.
The subject is blind to any sense of progress, ‘heedless of the way’,
and seems not to care about which state of being—death or life?—
asserts itself with authority: ‘one gleam or the other’. Lines seven
and nine bracket the self with sound (which is ‘unheard’, but not
necessarily, silent) and then silence: ‘unheard footfalls only sound’;
‘then no sound’. Within this bracket the self fades: ‘absent for good
from self and other’. It seems as if the subject—if this is indeed the
word—has achieved a kind of liberation: it is now no longer caught
between the binary of self and other; life and death; self and unself.
The distinctions between these states have vanished. But notice that
this vanishing is completely arbitrary and occurs without motiva-
tion, without reason: it simply occurs, further suggesting the subject’s
utter passivity or powerlessness before the transitions being enacted
upon it (or being sought by it). The state of being, now, is the state
of ‘neither’. That this state is ‘unheeded’ seems logical: of course it
would be because there is now no subject to notice where it is; the
subject is fully effaced.
Notice too how the last words of the penultimate line ‘unheeded
neither’ seem at once to refer back to the subject, now ‘neither’ one
thing nor another, and forward to the final image of the ‘unspeakable
home’. I recall here Freud’s notion of the aim of all life being death.
Beckett’s ‘neither’ is a poem of a kind of nostalgia, a desire to return.
If nostalgia is a form of homesickness, a desire to return home, notice
how the subject seems to have achieved this: it has arrived at its
unspeakable home, the place where it is effaced, the place where,
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CONCLUSION
because not able to heed, or speak, it is unable, or perhaps even

unwilling—speechlessness is a desired goal in Beckett—to register its
own arrival. And yet, as always, the text itself offers itself to us as an
approximation of a state, of a site, that cannot be expressed. Having
removed the subject from the poem Beckett has effectively made the
reader, that is, you, the space where the unnamed subject comes into
being: we put its journey together just as we—as I have done here—
attempt to interpret the subject into coherence.
But, as always in Beckett, there are remainders, indivisible remain-
ders, to any reading. In texts as focused on specters as Beckett’s are
it is perhaps to be expected that spectral remains impinge upon any
readings, insistently, yet quietly, tracing what will not be readily
assimilated into any interpretation. My suggestion that this text is a
meditation on the transition to a space beyond opposition, beyond,
that is, the oppositional logic of Western thinking (good/bad, man/
woman, self/Other) cannot allow what is a very abstract idea to stand
simply as an abstraction. I therefore posit this ‘space beyond’ as a
kind of ‘death’ but Beckett’s text in no way suggests this directly:
‘unspeakable home’ becomes, for me, a figure, a trope, of Freud’s
return to death but notice how fragile that assertion is given how
Beckett, here in ‘neither’ and elsewhere (Texts for Nothing especially),
dismantles the comfort of the simple notion of ‘death’ standing as
a transition from ‘life’. Beckett’s ‘unspeakable home’ is not simply
death (as if the space of death is ever simple to speak of!) but is pre-
cisely a metaphor for (and a displacement of) an idea inassimilable to
the philosophical underpinnings of our language: we cannot con-
ceive of this space because we cannot speak of it.
‘neither’, like a great number of Beckett’s works, is about the
attempt to achieve the impossible because the aim, the end, as it is
represented in a text which cancels the very concept of beginnings
and endings, itself cannot be formulated in language. Beckett will
name this space beyond beginning, beyond ending, with the word
‘unspeakable’, but the word itself simply must signal its own weak-
ness, its own failure, its own inability to name what must be named;
‘unspeakable’ is a word that is present merely as an indication of an
absence, a nothing, an impossibility: the word is a blank space for an
idea which cannot be but must be expressed. Here, in this one word
which captures an entire philosophical world-view; in this one word
which in turn defies our interpretive will-to-power; here, surely, is the
literature, and the beauty, of the unword.
161
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1
See Knowlson (323–24) on Beckett’s turn to French.
2
Colin Duckworth ‘The Making of Godot’: 89.
3
‘The Uneventful Event’ Irish Times February 18, 1956.
4
The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett. Eds. C. J. Ackerley and
S. E. Gontarski: 621.
5
In his essay ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’ Adorno suggests that Endgame
represents the ‘final history of the subject’ (271) and reads the play as
representing the remnants of a ‘culture rebuilt after Auschwitz’ (267).
6
Alvarez writes that The Unnamable is a ‘stage-by-stage assassination of
the novel in all the forms in which it is traditionally received’ (Samuel
Beckett: 68).
7
Written in 1932 and not published until 1992.
8
Interview with Tom Driver. In Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage:
217–23.
9
Beckett Remembering Remembering Beckett: A Centenary Celebration.
Eds. James and Elizabeth Knowlson: 47–8.
10
Beckett may be parodying himself in Krapp’s Last Tape: Krapp, listening to
a thirty-year-old tape recording of his own voice, has to pause and consult
a dictionary to discover the meaning of a word (‘viduity’) he once knew.
11
According to Martin Esslin, author of The Theatre of the Absurd, Beckett
approved an early draft of Esslin’s chapter on his own dramatic work
saying ‘I like this because you raise many hares without pursuing them too
far’ (Beckett Remembering Remembering Beckett: 149).
12
See Catherine Belsey’s Critical Practice, Chapter 3.
13
The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters.
14
See Shane Weller’s interesting discussion of the German Letter in A Taste
for the Negative: 56–60.
15
‘The Melancholy Archive: Jose Saramago’s All the Names’ Genre XXXVIII
(Summer 2005).

1
Beckett had written a play, Eleutheria, in 1947 but it has never been
performed. It was published in English in 1995.
162
NOTES
2
In her biography Deirdre Bair notes that Beckett’s friends worried about
Beckett’s health while he was writing the second novel of the trilogy,
Malone Dies. She suggests that ‘everyone close to him feared that he might
quite literally die when it was finished’ (376).
3
Kenneth Tynan and Harold Hobson published positive reviews of the
play on August 7, 1955, which, as James Knowlson notes in his magiste-
rial biography Damned to Fame, did ‘everything’ (374) to change the public
perception of the play for the better.
4
The initial run in Paris was extended to over 300 productions. Beckett pre-
dicted that American productions of Godot would eventually succeed, noting
that even the ill-fated Miami production saw improvements in ‘audience and
business’ (Knowlson: 379). See also Jonathan Kalb’s discussion of the first
American performances of Godot in Beckett in Performance (24–5).
5
A Reader’s Guide.
6
Act Without Words opens with a character ‘flung backwards onstage
from right wing’ (87) in an act which literalizes Heidegger’s notion of
thrownness.
7
For a New Novel.
8
Four Quartets: ‘Burnt Norton’ (44–5).
9
It would seem that critics, like nature, abhor a vacuum. Kenner, forgetting
his own reading of the play, goes on to suggest that Godot can be read as
an allegory of France under the Nazi Occupation. Vladimir and Estragon
become resistance fighters (albeit rather inept resistance fighters) waiting
for a contact, Godot. Kenner draws some authority for this reading from
the fact that Beckett served with the French Résistance in 1941 and was
forced to flee Paris after his resistance cell was betrayed.
10
Other pseudo-couples include the title characters from the novel Mercier
and Camier, and Hamm and Clov in Endgame.
11
In Proust Beckett writes, ‘Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his
vomit. Breathing is habit. Life is habit’ (515).
12
Beckett maintained an interest in Bishop Berkeley’s idea that ‘to be is to
be perceived’ (esse est percipi). His 1963 film project, Film, is based around
Berkeley’s idea (it presents a man who ‘experiences anguish of perceived-
ness’ (163)); in Play (also 1963) a character asks ‘Am I as much as . . .
being seen?’ echoing Berkeley’s idea; Berkeley is mentioned in Lucky’s
speech in Waiting for Godot: ‘since the death of Bishop Berkeley’ (29).
Vladimir’s anxiety at the close of the two acts in Godot is for the Boy to
acknowledge that he has in fact seen Vladimir and Estragon.
13
And notice how Vladimir picks up Pozzo’s speech patterns, particularly
his terms of abuse: ‘Pig!’.
14
This is of course not to deny the possibility of reading the play through a
more specifically Judaic notion of the messiah.
15
We should note that Pozzo quotes from Saint Paul’s letter when confront-
ing Vladimir for having the temerity to ask him questions: ‘A question!
Who? What? A moment ago you were calling me Sir, in fear and trem-
bling. Now you are asking me questions’ (23).
16
On Derrida’s relation to Beckett see his fascinatingly elliptical interview in
Acts of Literature: 60.
163
NOTES
17
The best discussion of repetition in Beckett remains Steven Connor’s
seminal Repetition, Theory and Text. See especially Chapter 6: ‘Presence
and Repetition in Beckett’s Theatre’.
18
Early in the play Vladimir bungles a quotation from Proverbs 13:12 :‘Hope
deferred maketh the something sick, who said that?’ (5). The actual
passage reads ‘Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire
cometh, it is the tree of life’.
19
Just Play: Beckett’s Theater.
20
Beckett wrote of Endgame’s power to ‘claw’ in a letter to Alan Schneider
(June 21, 1956). Beckett here also drew a contrast between Endgame
and Godot saying that Endgame is ‘more inhuman than Godot’ (No Author
Better Served: 11).
21
On the trope of habit in Endgame see Eric P. Levy’s recent Trapped in
Thought (170–72).
22
See Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life.
23
Beckett himself maintained that Nagg and Nell were placed in rubbish
bins purely for technical purposes: he needed them to be able to appear
and disappear without the distraction of conventional entrances and exits
(Bair: 469).
24
Kalb writes that Endgame is ‘not about life after nuclear holocaust, which
neither Beckett nor anyone else could possibly depict; it about our own lives,
which are lived under the threat of disaster, nuclear or otherwise’ (81).
25
I borrow from Derrida’s The Ear of the Other for the metaphor of mourn-
ing as a kind of consumption of loss. He writes ‘In the work of mourning,
the dead other . . . is taken into me: I kill it and remember it . . . I digest it,
assimilate it’ (58).
26
In this sense Beckett takes the central existential concept—that human-
kind is, as Sartre puts is, condemned to be free—and turns it on its head.
There is no freedom on a stage.

1
In Damned to Fame (398) James Knowlson claims Beckett listened to tape
recordings of actor Patrick Magee in January 1958. For a discussion of
Krapp’s fragmented sense of self, see Paul Lawley’s ‘Stages of Identity’:
90.
2
Early Greek Philosophy and Other Essays.
3
Commentators and biographers have often noted that Krapp’s ‘vision’
resembles one that Beckett himself had in 1945 while staying with his
ailing mother in Foxrock. Here, as he told biographer James Knowlson,
he had a vision of his own ignorance, impotence, and ‘stupidity’ (319). He
would mark this moment as his realization that his task as a writer, as
opposed to that of Joyce, was ‘in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge
and in taking away, in subtracting rather than adding’ (319).
4
Compare to Paul Davies’ reading of these lines in Beckett and Eros: 149.
5
In A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett. See Kenner (147) on the Englishness
of the play. Compare Kenner to Shane Weller’s idea that Winnie represents
164
NOTES
a version of Schopenhauer’s ‘cheerful child woman’ (Beckett, Literature,

and the Ethics of Alterity: 179).
6
According to rehearsal notes kept by Martha Fehsenfeld of the 1979
Royal Court Theatre production of Happy Days, Beckett saw Winnie as ‘a
bit mad. Manic is not wrong, but too big . . . A child woman with a short
span of concentration—sure one minute, unsure the next’ (Images of
Beckett: 108).
7
The early manuscripts show Willie reading newspaper headlines
about rocket attacks: ‘Rocket strikes Pomona, seven hundred thousand
missing’ . . . ‘Aberrant rocket strikes Man, one female lavatory attendant
spared’ (quoted in Gontarski: The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s
Dramatic Texts: 80). Surely a trace of the idea that this world has been
obliterated by military attack lingers in the finished play.
8
On Beckett. For a reading of Badiou’s Beckett, see Andrew Gibson’s
Beckett and Badiou.
9
See Lawley (90) on Winnie’s habitual allusion making.
10
Ruby Cohn notes how the interaction of light and actor blurs the bound-
aries between the stage world and the real world (‘The Femme Fatale on
Beckett’s Stage’: 167). For an acute discussion of the materiality of the
body in Beckett’s drama see Katherine M. Gray’s excellent ‘Troubling
the Body’.
11
Beckett insisted the lines be delivered rapidly and in a flat monotone. The
audience, like that of Not I, is not meant to grasp the story immediately.
We are asked to absorb the impact of the image as our first interpretive
task.
12
On this question see Katherine Worth’s ‘Past into Future’ who argues that
there is indeed some kind of future being proffered in this play.
13
Compare my Freudian to Anna McMullan’s Lacanian reading of this
play in Theatre on Trial: 17–25.
14
Quoted in Bair’s Samuel Beckett: A Biography.
15
On Mouth’s refusal to speak of herself directly, see Keir Elam’s ‘Dead
Heads: Damnation-Narration in the “Dramaticules”’: 151.
16
For an important reading of Not I and the question of trauma see
Katherine Weiss’s ‘Bit and Pieces: The Fragmented Body in Not I and
That Time’. Yoshiki Tajiri offers an interesting reading of Mouth as pros-
thesis in Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body: 105.
17
Quoted in Bair’s Samuel Beckett: A Biography.
18
When Jessica Tandy, who portrayed Mouth in the world premiere, asked
if Mouth had been raped in the field, Beckett was shocked: ‘ “How
could you think of such a thing! No, no, not at all—it wasn’t that at all” ’
(Bair: 624). Typically, however, Beckett refused to explain what happened
to Mouth.
19
The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.
20
‘Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’. The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. VII.
21
On Mouth’s relation to language see Ann Wilson’s ‘Her Lips Moving’.
22
Interview with Tom Driver: Samuel Beckett the Critical Heritage: 219.
165
NOTES
MURPHY AND WATT

1
A Dream of Fair to Middling Women was written between 1931 and 1932.
The novel was not published until 1992, three years after Beckett’s death.
2
For an energetic reading of the body in Murphy see Gavin Dowd’s recent
Abstract Machines: 85–6.
3
For the Freudian and Jungian influences on Beckett’s representation of
Murphy’s mind See Knowlson, Chapter 9. For another reading of the
structure of Murphy’s mind see J. E. Dearlove’s Accommodating the
Chaos, Chapter 2.
4
J. D. O’Hara and Chris Ackerley find traces of Beckett’s interest in
Schopenhauer (especially the philosopher’s idea of will-lessness) in this
image of the dark. See O’Hara’s Samuel Beckett’s Hidden Drives and
Ackerley’s special issue of the Journal of Beckett Studies:The Demented
Particulars. For further analysis of Schopenhauer and Murphy see John
Wall’s ‘Murphy, Belacqua, Schopenhauer, and Descartes’.
5
For a reading of Murphy’s relationship to work see Gibson’s Beckett and
Badiou, Chapter 4.
6
Freud posits two forces determining the course of the subject’s life, the
drive toward pleasure (Eros), and the drive toward death (Thanatos). As
he grew older and more pessimistic about the course of human history,
Freud began to theorize that humanity is more determined by the destruc-
tive impulse than that of pleasure. Hence his seminal work: Beyond the
Pleasure Principle.
7
See Brecht on Theatre for an elaboration of Bertold Brecht’s idea of the
alienation-effect.
8
Knowlson, 282.
9
Knowlson, 288.
10
Leslie Hill describes Watt beautifully: ‘Watt unfolds as an intricate
cartography of language, a fictional inquiry into what constitutes the
foundations of language and the real world, language and human subjec-
tivity’ (Beckett’s Fiction: 20).
11
Interpreting Narrative in the Novels of Samuel Beckett, Chapter 1.
12
For a reading of the importance of this speech see Paul Stewart’s Zone
of Evaporation, Chapter 2 (especially 69). See also John Calder (The
Philosophy of Samuel Beckett): Calder suggests that Arsene’s speech
anticipates the monologues of the trilogy; looking at Arsene’s name
Calder suggests, somewhat unhelpfully, that the speech is ‘like a prolonged
fart’ (31).
13
In The Will to Power, for instance, Nietzsche writes: ‘interpretation is
itself a means of becoming master of something’ (342); ‘All “purposes,”
“aims,” “meanings” are only modes of expression and metamorphoses of
one will that is inherent in all events: the will to power’ (356): most bluntly,
he writes: ‘All meaning is will to power’ (323).
14
The Visible and the Invisible.
15
For a reading of Knott as an emblem of ‘infinity’ see Gibson: 157.
16
For a divergent reading of the role of otherness in Watt see Daniel Katz,
Saying I No More: 49.
166
NOTES
17
On the religious element in Watt see Lawrence Harvey’s Samuel Beckett:
Poet and Critic, especially 364ff.

1
Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: 382. It should be noted, as do Gontarski
and Ackerley in The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett (citing letters to
John Calder and Barney Rosset [586]), that Beckett did not approve of the
term ‘trilogy’ to describe these novels.
2
The characters Murphy and Watt are named in The Unnamable (326) as
are Mercier and Camier (297) the eponymous characters from a novel
composed between July 1945 and October 1946 but not published until
1970.
3
Eric P. Levy writes that in Molloy ‘selfhood disintegrates into relations
whose terms are unstable and readily confused’ (207).
4
On this idea that Moran creates Molloy compare Paul Stewart’s Zone of
Evaporation: 107.
5
In The Poetics of Prose, literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov suggests that
one of the conventions of the detective story is ‘the vulnerable detective’
(51), a figure who is open to physical attack and is often battered by his
opponents during the course of his investigation. Perhaps Moran reflects
part of this tradition, but surely his vulnerability is more metaphysical
than physical.
6
Moran here names characters from previous Beckett novels: Mercier and
Watt. Moran is perhaps representing himself as the author of these
novels.
7
Porter Abbott has a very useful chart listing the links between the two
characters in The Fiction of Samuel Beckett: Form and Effect (100). See
also Rubin Rabinovitz’s ‘Repetition and Underlying Meanings in Samuel
Beckett’s Trilogy’ for another mapping of the relation between Molloy
and Moran.
8
Gadamer discusses the idea of prejudice as a kind of knowing in Truth
and Method; see Part III, Chapter 1: 397.
9
Blanchot is a canny reader of Beckett. His essay on the trilogy ‘ “Where
Now? Who Now?” ’ as well as his reflections on How It Is in The Infinite
Conversation are touchstones for any philosophical treatment of Beckett’s
fiction.
10
The Instant of My Death is a short narrative Blanchot published in 1994.
11
On boredom in Malone Dies see Joe Brooker’s ‘What Tedium’.
12
See Steven Connor’s acute discussion of these lines in Samuel Beckett: 68.
13
For another reading of the function of play (as a return to the infantile
state), see Hill: 102. For a reading of the role of narrative as such, see
Brian Duffy’s ‘Malone meurt’.
14
Calder sees Beckett ‘imitating God’ ‘whose creations are just as random,
wild, cruel, and destructive’ (118) in these final moments of Malone Dies.
15
See again Stewart’s Zone of Evaporation, Chapter 4.
16
Calder sees the unnamable as a ‘mind slowly fading out after the body has
gone cold’ (119).
167
NOTES
17
Letter on Humanism.
18
On the unnamable’s relation to language see Connor: 74.
19
‘The Death of the Author’ in Image Music Text: 145.
20
I like Leslie Hill’s description of the unnamable’s condition: ‘There remains,
to speech, an excess, a supplement, a waste which cannot be pronounced
or incorporated within words’ (82). On this issue of language as waste
see my essay ‘ “Wordshit, bury me”: The Waste of Narrative in Samuel
Beckett’s Texts for Nothing ’.
21
See Daniel Katz’s ‘Saying I No More’: Subjectivity and Consciousness in
the Prose of Samuel Beckett for an extended analysis of this issue, what he
calls ‘the most perfect aporia’ (112). See especially 98ff., 104, and 112–13.

1
For further discussion of the link between Texts for Nothing and the first
trilogy see Paul Sheehan’s ‘Nothing is More Real’.
2
In Beckett Writing Beckett, Porter Abbott suggests that we read these
texts as a variation on the ‘meditative personal essay’ (90). In ‘Beginning
Again’ Abbott offers another useful reading of Texts as a kind of
‘post-narrative’.
3
This line should remind us of Moran’s ‘It seemed to me that all language
was an excess of language’ (Molloy: 116)
4
For an extended analysis of the trope of mourning in Texts for Nothing
see my ‘Does Mourning Require a Subject? Samuel Beckett’s Texts for
Nothing’.
5
Kateryna Arthur makes a link between Texts for Nothing and Company in
her excellent ‘Texts for Company’.
6
See Enoch Brater’s ‘Voyelles, Cromlechs and the Special (W)rites of
Worstward Ho’ for a discussion of the problematics of reading late Beckett.
7
See Paul Davies’ The Ideal Real, Chapter 8, for a useful discussion of the
readability of this text.
8
Carla Locatelli’s Unwording the Word remains the most theoretically
sophisticated reading of The Second Trilogy. See, for instance, her discus-
sion of the ‘I’ as it creates company: 157–87.
9
Borrowing from Deleuze and Guattari, Arthur suggests that Company is
a form of ‘schizophrenic’ writing. Her analysis is one of the best I have
seen on Company.
10
While I avoid biographical readings generally, we should note that a great
number of the memories and details from family life in Company are
Beckett’s own: Beckett’s own father left for a walk during Beckett’s birth;
Beckett, like the ‘you’ in Company was born on Good Friday; Beckett too
once asked his mother about the distance to the sky and was given a ‘cut-
ting retort’ (96). For a discussion of these elements of Company see Abbott
(Beckett Writing Beckett) and Brian Finney’s ‘Still to Worstward Ho’.
11
I am reminded of Chris Marker’s 1962 film masterpiece La Jetee. Marker
tells his story, with the exception of one brief moment, through a series of
still photographs. Marker sets up an uncanny frisson by playing against
the expectations of a medium, film, which fetishizes movement.
168
NOTES
12
Susan Brienza seems convinced that Ill Seen Ill Said is ‘obdurately about
writing’ (Samuel Becket’s New Worlds: 239).
13
On this point see Nicholas Zurbrugg’s excellent ‘Ill Seen Ill Said and the
Sense of an Ending’.
14
Beckett is playing with various allusions here: his title looks back on
Webster and Dekker’s play Westward Hoe (1607) and to Kingsley’s
Westward Ho! (1884).
15
See Locatelli on this image of the ‘Seat of all. Germ of all’: 253.
16
On this point see Gontarski’s excellent Introduction to Nohow On, espe-
cially xxiv–xxv.
CONCLUSION
1
I might simply remind the reader of Beckett’s agony while writing Malone
Dies or refer her to Beckett’s correspondence with friend Alan Schneider
to demonstrate Beckett’s loathing of the writing, revision, and translation
processes. In a letter of June 1958, Beckett refers to the effort of translat-
ing The Unnamable into English: ‘I’m disgustingly tired & stupefied since
finishing L’Innomable and writing seems more than ever before a quite
impossible enterprise’ (47); in a letter dated September 12, 1960, Beckett
details his frustration with the writing of Happy Days ‘I am badly stuck in
the new play’; ‘Too depressing and difficult to write about’ (77). In a letter
dated January 19, 1962, Beckett refers to the translation of How It Is as
‘the most distasteful job I ever took on’ (119).
2
‘neither’ was recorded in 1990 by the Radio-Sinfonie-Orchester under
the direction of Zoltan Pesko. It is labeled an ‘Opera’ with ‘Words’ by
Samuel Beckett and music by Morton Feldman. The blurb on the CD
cover (written by Art Lange) suggests that although the piece is billed as
an opera ‘it makes use of none of the conventions of traditional opera.
There is no story, no mise-en-scene’.
169
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Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, pp. 217–23.
Duckworth, C. (1967), ‘The making of Godot’, in Ruby Cohn (ed.),
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Duffy, B. (1997), ‘Malone meurt: The comfort of narrative’, Journal of
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Elam, K. (1995), ‘Dead heads: Damnation-narrative in the “dramaticules’’’,
in John Piling (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Beckett. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 145–66.
Eliot, T. S. (1971), Four Quartets. The Complete Poems and Plays 1909–1950.
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Feyerabend, P. (1993), Against Method. London: Verso.
Finney, B. (1987), ‘Still to Worstward Ho’, in James Acheson and Kateryna
Arthur (eds), Beckett’s Later Fiction and Drama. New York: St. Martin’s
Press, pp. 65–79.
Fowles, J. (1969), The French Lieutenant’s Woman. New York: Signet.
Freud, S. (1991), Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in Angela Richards (ed.),
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— (1991), ‘Mourning and melancholia’, in Angela Richards (ed.), Beyond
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— (1953), ‘Fragments of an analysis of a case of hysteria’, in James Strachey
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Gadamer, H. G. (1989), Truth and Method (2nd ed.). Joel Weinsheimer and
Donald G., Marshall (trans). New York: Continuum.
— (1976), Philosophical Hermeneutics. David E. Linge (trans). Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Gibson, A. (2006), Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Gontarski, S. (1996), ‘Introduction’. Nohow On. New York: Grove, pp. vii–xxviii.
— (1985), The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts.
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Gray, K. M. (1996), ‘Troubling the body: Toward a theory of Beckett’s use of
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Harmon, M. (ed.). (1998), No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of
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Harvey, L. (1970), Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic. Princeton: Princeton
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Haynes, J. and Knowlson, J. (2003), Images of Beckett. Cambridge:
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Heidegger, M. (1977), ‘Letter on humanism’, in Martin Heidegger: Basic
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— (1962), Being and Time. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (trans).
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Hill, L. (1990), Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Words. Cambridge: Cambridge
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Huizinga, J. (1970), Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture.

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Jameson, F. (1981), The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially
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— (1972), The Prison-House of Language. Princeton: Princeton University
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Kalb, J. (1989), Beckett in Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University
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Katz, D. (1999), Saying I No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness in the
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Kenner, H. (1973), A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett. London: Thames
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Knowlson, J. (2006), Beckett Remembering Remembering Beckett: A
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— (1996), Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. New York: Simon
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Locatelli, C. (1990), Unwording the World: Samuel Beckett’s Prose Works
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174
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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E. Peck (eds), The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Volume VII.
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Stewart, P. (2006), Zone of Evaporation: Samuel Beckett’s Disjunctions.
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Cornell University Press.
Wall, J. (2000), ‘Murphy, Belacqua, Schopenhauer, and Descartes:
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Weiss, K. (2002), ‘Bits and pieces: The fragmented body in Not I and That
Time’, in Daniela Caselli, Steven Connor, and Laura Salisbury (eds),
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Weller, S. (2006), Beckett, Literature, and the Ethics of Alterity. Houndmills:
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— (2003), A Taste for the Negative: Beckett and Nihilism. London:
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Wilson, A. (1990), ‘“Her lips moving”: The castrated voice of Not I’, in
Linda Ben-Zvi (ed.), Women in Beckett. Urbana: University of Illinois
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Worth, K. (1987), ‘Past into future: Krapp’s Last Tape to Breath’, in James
Acheson and Kateryna Arthur (eds), Beckett’s Later Fiction and Drama.
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Zizek, S. (2007), The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related
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— (2006), How To Read Lacan. London: Granta.
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FURTHER READING
Abbott, H. P. (1973), The Fiction of Samuel Beckett: Form and Effect.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Abbott’s introduction to Beckett’s prose ranges from the early fiction through
the major novels: Murphy, Watt, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable,
How It Is. He also gives important attention to Texts for Nothing and the
neglected Mercier and Camier. An analysis of what Abbott calls ‘imitative
form’, the book looks at how the form of the fiction works particular
effects on the reader.
175
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adorno, T. (1991), ‘Trying to understand Endgame’, in Shierry Weber

Nicholsen (trans), Notes to Literature. Volume One. New York : Columbia
University Press, pp. 241–75.
Adorno may have written ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’, but
Beckett is one writer Adorno allows to express his response to the condi-
tions of contemporary experience, to the post-Holocaust world. Surely
one of the most important philosophical readings of Beckett, Adorno
reads Endgame as accurately reflecting a world in which the very idea of
meaning is no longer tenable.
Blanchot, M. (2003),‘Where now? Who now?’, in Charlotte Mandell (trans),
The Book to Come. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Blanchot, along with Adorno and Badiou, has given the most philosophi-
cally nuanced readings of Beckett. This short essay reads Beckett’s first
trilogy, especially The Unnamable, in terms of its aporias—its impasses—
of voice and place. Blanchot is interested in exploring the question of
subjectivity and interiority: Who speaks these novels? How do we respond
to novels when we cannot locate a writer or speaker?
Cohn, R. (1980), Just Play: Beckett’s Theater. New Jersey: Princeton Uni-
versity Press.
Cohn is one of the most important senior critics of Beckett. This text,
a reading of all the major plays, stands as an advanced critical introduc-
tion to the drama. Cohn is interested in exploring the theatricality of the
plays, the manner in which a kind of self-consciousness arises in the plays’
awareness of themselves as theatrical experiences.
Connor, S. (1998), Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory, and Text. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Connor’s book is the high-water mark of deconstructively inflected readings
of Beckett and is a comprehensive exploration of the major prose and
drama. It reads the work alongside the trope of repetition, repetition
which at once marks an experience as crucial—it is doubled and thus takes
on a kind urgency—and marks that experience as essentially absent given
that it is now no longer unique. Connor analyzes how repetition in Beckett
functions to destabilize yet also to fetishize experience.
Gontarski, S. (1985), The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic
Texts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
With Cohn, Gontarski is the most important senior Beckett critic. The
Intent of Undoing draws on Gontarski’s interest in the shifting identities
of Beckett’s texts as they pass through editorial and authorial changes.
Gontarski has done the crucial work of offering genealogical analyses
of the Beckett text drawing important attention to the organic nature of
textual evolution.
Hill, L. (1990), Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Words. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
In some ways a companion to Abbott’s Form and Effect, Hill’s philosophi-
cally nuanced book is an attempt to think through what he calls ‘textual
affects’, how the verbal and textual complexities of Beckett’s prose (and
the book analyzes the major prose works) work on the reader’s interpre-
tive responses.
176
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kenner, H. (1973), A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett. London: Thames

and Hudson.
The best general introduction to Beckett’s work, Kenner’s text suffers only
from having been published in 1973. Thus he is unable to offer readings
of the work of the late 1970s and 1980s. Kenner’s work is the most accessi-
ble reading of Beckett’s work available: forgoing philosophical fogginess
or trendy theoretical obfuscation, Kenner reads the work in its historical-
literary contexts and offers reasoned interpretations of the most challenging
texts from the drama to the prose.
Katz, D. (1999), Saying I No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness in the
Prose of Samuel Beckett. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
A brilliant recent analysis of the major prose, Katz offers a reading of
Beckettian subjectivity inflected through the poststructuralisms of Derrida,
Blanchot, and others. Katz is concerned to work out the various complexi-
ties that arise when the Beckettian subject speaks: Who or what is it that
controls the ‘I’ of the speaker? How does a Beckettian subject negotiate an
identity if her language precedes her or exceeds her control? Katz’s text
balances complex philosophical interpretations against close, enormously
smart readings of the texts.
Knowlson, J. (1996), Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. New York:
Simon and Schuster.
The best biography of Beckett, superseding and eclipsing all other biogra-
phies. Damned to Fame is simply one of the best literary biographies of
a modern writer, rivaling even Richard Ellmann’s biography of Joyce.
Knowlson’s research is impeccable and massively detailed. Knowlson
never simply reads the literary work as a reflection of biographical details,
but rather he allows the story of Beckett’s life to complement the various
excellent readings of the work.
Locatelli, C. (1990), Unwording the World: Samuel Beckett’s Prose Works
after the Nobel Prize. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
This is a curiously titled book, given that Locatelli offers a substantial and
excellent chapter on Beckett’s theater since the 1970s. Nevertheless,
Unwording the World is one of the best and theoretically challenging books
on Beckett’s late works available, mobilizing as it does a complex post-
structuralism to offer a genealogy of Beckett’s radical experiments in prose
and drama. Her analysis anticipates and complements the work of Katz
and supplements the gaps in Kenner’s work.
177
INDEX
absent God 34–6, 40 Not I 72

action 29 responsibility 48–9
Adorno, Theodor 2, 43–4 Auster, Paul 4
aesthetics of suffering 156 authorial agency 95–6, 135
after, existence in 63–4 autonomy 50
Agamben, Giorgio 41
agency Badiou, Alain 61
authorial 95–6 Banville, John 4
Murphy 90–2 Barthes, Roland 126
The Unnamable 125–6 Baudrillard, Jean 154
agony 18 beauty 157–8, 161
Albee, Edward 4 Beckett, Samuel
Alighieri, Dante 65 background and influence 1–4
allegorical real 65–7 biography 1
allegory 64–5, 127, 146 centenary 7
Alvarez, Al 3 early works 1–2
anxiety 2, 72–6 French Résistance 96–7
aporia 121, 128 influence on drama and
archival persistence 64 fiction 3–4
the archive 22–4 Nobel Prize 2
Archive Fever (Derrida) 22–3, 55 relation to language 128
archives 55, 56, 63–4, 75 resisting interpretation 9–10
Arsene 99–100 style 4–7
art 11–12 use of language 5
artist, as posthuman 129 visit to Germany 19–20
artistic experience 155 why read? 157–8
assumptions, detective Being and Time (Heidegger) 30, 70
narrative 110–11 being spoken, The Unnamable
astrology, Murphy 91–2 125–7
audience 38–9 belief 38, 39–40
Happy Days 60–1 Beyond the Pleasure Principle
necessity of 46 (Freud) 67–8, 92–4
INDEX
binary, subject-object 114, 116–17 death drive 89, 92, 94, 151
Blanchot, Maurice 118, 120, 122, deconstruction, as major theme 8
129, 130, 159 deferred action 55–6
body denial 62–3, 139
as archive 63–4 Derrida, Jacques 22–3, 35–6, 55,
diminishing 52–3, 109 56, 64, 82, 83, 108
elimination of 12 Descartes, Rénè 71
Endgame 41 desinence 137
and history 23 desire 66, 82, 89, 151–3
persistence 14–15 despair 44
reduced 71–3 detective narrative, Molloy
boredom 11, 30, 120, 154 109–11
breakdowns, Watt 99 determinism 49–50, 84–5
Breath 3 dizziness, interpretive 7
drama of nothing 29–31
Caruth, Cathy 55–6, 68, 69, 74 drama, of the real 76–7
Chambers, Iain 123
characters 17, 88–9, 134–6 early novels, shape 81–2
chess 41 Eliot, T.S. 30
Christianity 35 embodiment 61, 64, 109
classic realism 109–10 emotions 138
Clov 41, 47–8 Endgame 2
Coetzee, J.M. 4 audience responsibility 48–9
Company 23 autonomy 50
memory 138–9 body 41
narrative 139 context 27, 41–2
posthumanism 142 ethical responsibility 48
solitude 138–41 free will 49–51
spectral subjects 141–2 history 50–1
compassion 15, 109 interpretive key 41
consistency, thematic 52 nostalgia 44–5
constructedness 9 nothing 42–3
content, Murphy 84–5, 89 postholocaust 42–4
context 2, 27 repetition 48–9
control 128, 140 time 45
crisis 10–11 entrapment, Happy Days 61
crisis of detection 114–18 epiphany 56, 100
critique of reason 109–11 Eros 89, 92, 93
Culture After Humanism: History, Estragon
Culture, Subjectivity 123 belief and faith 39–40
curiosity 10–11 relationships 31–4
religious associations 34–6
dark 86–8 self-awareness 39
death 13, 94–6, 118–19, 122–3 time 37–8
180
INDEX
ethics 28, 48 marriage 60–2

expectation 7–9, 30 nothing 63
quotations 62
face 146 self-awareness 61
failing words, Worstward time 63
Ho 149–51 Hegel, Georg 33
failure 131–2, 136, 156 Heidegger, Martin 30, 70, 126
faith 39–40 Hell, Play 65
fantasies of non-being, Texts for hermeneutics 16
Nothing 132–4 historical context 2
fictionality, Murphy 84 history 22–3, 24, 50–1, 52
form, Murphy 84–5, 89 Homo Ludens (Huizinga) 120–1
free will 49–51, 84–5 How It Is 138
Freud, Sigmund 13, 21, 23, 24, 45, How to Read Lacan 130
55–6, 67–9, 74, 82, 87, 92–4, 151 Huizinga, Johan 120–1
fundamentals 10 humanism 12–13, 155
future trauma 55–8 humor 4–5
Gadamer, Hans-Georg 3, 16, identity 73, 111–14, 115, 116, 123

103–4, 121, 126 ideology, Happy Days 60–1
generic decomposition 7–8 Ill Seen Ill Said
genre 7–9 allegory 146
German Letter 19–20, 59–60, 147 image 142–4
ghosts 13–14, 83 manipulative narrator 143–4
Gift of Death (Derrida) 35 seeing eye 145–7
God, absent 34–6, 40 shattered prose 143
Godot, Beckett’s regret of name 34–5 witnessing 144–5
image
habit 32, 154 as essence 70–1
Hamm Happy Days 58–9
autonomy 50 Ill Seen Ill Said 142–4
body 41 transcending language 76–7
narrative 46–7 visual 60
nostalgia and melancholy 45 Imaginary register 73
postholocaust 43 impossibility 134
self-pity 47–8 Inferno (Dante) 65
happiness, Krapp’s Last Tape 57–8 interpretation 38–9
Happy Days 3 crisis of 11
audience 60–1 posthumanism 81–4
being ‘after’ 63–4 problematization 82
body as archive 63–4 problems of 16–18
entrapment 61 resistance to 9–10
ideology 60–1 Watt 101
image 58–9 irony 5
181
INDEX
Jameson, Fredric 49, 74 loneliness 138, 145

Joyce, James 1, 4, 5 loss 21–2, 23, 155
Lucky 33–4, 37
Kafka, Franz 27
Kane, Sarah 4 madness of order, Watt 97–9
Kaun, Axel 19 Malone Dies 3
Kenner, Hugh 30, 31, 60, 65, 132 boredom 120
Knott, as Other 104–6 death 118–19
Knowlson, James 5 fundamental question 10
Krapp 56–7 irony 5
Krapp’s Last Tape the limit 118–19
context 53–4 posthumanism 13
future trauma 55–8 use of language 5–6
happiness 57–8 writing 118–23
melancholy archive 55 marginalization 4
specters 18 marriage
technology 53–4 Happy Days 60–2
Play 66–7
Lacan, Jacques 18, 73–6, 140, 154 Marx, Karl 13
language meanings
Beckett’s view of 19–20 absence of 17
as character 6–7 collapse 11
and control 128–9 creation of 40
elimination of 152, 156 desire for 102–3
ending 59–60 loss of 44
and experience 3 multiple 6
failure 136 possibility of 43–4
fragmented 148 melancholia 21–2, 44–8
inadequacy 134 melancholy archive 55
in relation with the memory 21–2, 53–4, 56–7, 138–9,
Stranger 103–4 140
representational 9 Mercier, Vivian 29
Symbolic register 73 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 102
transcending 76–7 metanarrative 96
The Unnamable 126 metaphors, visual 58–9, 68–9
use of 5 Metastases of Enjoyment (Zizek) 74
Learning to Live Finally Molloy 3
(Derrida) 108 crisis of detection 114–18
Levinas, Emmanuel 18, 102–4, 105, detective narrative 109–11
106 identity crisis 111–14
liminal space 125 Moran 114–18
the limit 118–19, 122–3 as parody 109–10
literature of the unword 20–1, 138, self-understanding 111–12
147, 155–6 use of language 6
182
INDEX
Moran 114–18 reduced body 71–3

mourning 45, 137 shattered narrative 71–2
‘Mourning and Melancholia’ trauma 72
(Freud) 21, 45 nothing 5–6, 7
Mouth Beckett’s exploration 11–12
as image 70–1 drama of 29–31
narrative 72 Endgame 42–3
Real register 75–6 Happy Days 63
Symbolic register 74 Not I 76
Murphy 86–8, 94–6 Watt 106–7
Murphy Worstward Ho 152
agency 90–2 nothingness 8, 10, 30–1, 76, 92–3,
astrology 91–2 140
desire 89 novel 109–11
determined character 88–9
fictionality 84 object 102, 111
form/content 84–5, 89 ontology 6, 132, 134, 149, 160
free will and determinism 84–5 oppositions 111–14
nostalgia 93 order 97–9, 120–1
prophecy 90–2 the Other 144 see also otherness
self-awareness 82, 85–6, 90 Otherness 103–6 see also the Other
Nachtraglichkeit 55–6 pain 155

Nagg 41, 45 paralysis 39
narrative parody, Worstward Ho 148
Company 139 past, denial of 139
deconstruction 14, 81 The Perfect Crime
Endgame 46–7 (Baudrillard) 154
as expression of human 9 permanence, Play 67–70
shattered 71–2 perplexity, of characters and
without subject 149 readers 16–17
narrator, manipulative 143–4 persistence 61, 130
‘neither’ 159–61 phantoms 135–7
Nell 41, 45 Philosophical Hermeneutics
Nietzsche, Friedrich 13, 54, 102 (Gadamer) 16
nostalgia 27, 41, 44–5, 93 piano tuners, Watt 101
Not I 3, 14, 18 Pinter, Harold 3–4
anxiety 72–6 Play 3
audience response 72 allegorical real 65–7
drama of the real 76–7 allegory 64–5
image as essence 70–1 characters as narrative 14
Lacanian interpretation 72–6 desire 66
Mouth as archive 75 marriage 66–7
nothing 76 permanence 67–70
183
INDEX
Play (Cont’d ) Resistances of Psychoanalysis

posthumanism 13 (Derrida) 82
repetition compulsion 67–70 resistant text 82, 156–8
as vision of Hell 65 rhetoric, self-cancelling 6, 112–13
play, as order 120–1 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 30
postholocaust 42–4
posthuman space 122 Saint Paul 35
posthumanism 12–15, 109, 155 salvation 35–6, 37–8
Company 142 Schneider, Alan 9–10
and desire 151–3 seeing eye, Ill Seen Ill Said 145–7
interpretation of 81–4 self-awareness 2, 156
and language 128–9 Happy Days 61
self 138 Murphy 85–6, 90
Texts for Nothing 134 in Murphy and Watt 82
The Unnamable 123–4 Texts for Nothing 135
use of term 15–16 Waiting for Godot 38–9
postnarrative 124 self-cancelling rhetoric 6, 112–13
power 103 self-consciousness see
Pozzo self-awareness
belief and faith 39–40 self-contradiction 6
relationships 33–4 self, reduction of 12, 14
self-awareness 39 self-understanding 111–12
time 37 shape, of early novels 81–2
prophecy, Murphy 90–2 silence 136, 137
prose, shattered 143 singularity 4
Proust 16, 21, 50 situations, unfamiliar and
Proust, Marcel 154 unreadable 7
pseudo-couples 31, 34 solitude, Company 138–41
sounds, fundamental 10–11
quotations, Happy Days 62 speaking, The Unnamable 125–7
specters 13–14, 83, 137
the Real 154 stories, dead 134–6
real, allegorical 65–7 the Stranger 103–4
Real register 74, 76–7 subject
realigning, drama of 76–7 as character 127–9
reason, critique of 109–11 shattered 139
redemption 35–6 spectral 132, 137, 141–2
reduced body 71–3 subject-object binary 114,
reduction, plot and character 10 116–17
regret 18 subjectivity
regret, Krapp’s Last Tape 53 as embodiment 15
relationships, inescapable 31–4 nothingness 10
repetition 36, 46, 48–9 perplexing 132
repetition compulsion, Play 67–70 without subject 129, 131, 159
184
INDEX
suffering 154–5 Krapp’s Last Tape 55–8

aesthetics of 156 Not I 72
Symbolic register 73, 140 Texts for Nothing 133
understanding 68, 69
technology, Krapp’s Last Tape 53–4 Watt 106–7
text, resistant 82, 156–8 truth 54
Texts for Nothing 83, 130 ‘Truth and Falsity in Their
dead characters/dead Extra-Moral Sense’
stories 134–6 (Nietzsche) 54
failure 131–2 Truth and Method (Gadamer) 3,
fantasies of non-being 132–4 121
inadequacy of language 134 ‘Trying to Understand
mourning 137 Endgame’ 43–4
phantoms 135–7
posthumanism 134 uncanny 82, 83
relationship with The Unclaimed Experience
Unnamable 131–2 (Caruth) 55–6
self-awareness 135 undead partial object 130, 131
time 133 unhappiness 41
trauma 133 The Unnamable 3
Thanatos see death drive agency 125–6
things 62 allegory 127
Three Dialogues 11, 16–17, 128 language 126, 128
ties that bind 31–4 the limit 123
time posthumanism 123–4
deconstruction in Waiting for questioning 17
Godot 36–8 relationship with Texts for
deconstruction of understanding Nothing 131–2
of 27–8 speaking/being spoken 125–7
Endgame 45, 48 subject as character 127–9
Happy Days 63 unword 122–3
Texts for Nothing 133 unwording, German Letter 59–60
Totality and Infinity 103
trajectories veil, as metaphor for
embodied to disembodied language 19–20
characters 12, 52–3, 143 visual image 60
Murphy’s death 92 visual metaphors 58–9, 68–9
narrative and novelistic Vladimir
forms 81 belief and faith 39–40
reduction 20–1 relationships 31–4
trauma religious associations 34–6
and death drive 92 self-awareness 39
as descriptive of Real 74 time 37–8
encounter with Other 106 voice 137
185
INDEX
Waiting for Godot 2–3 why read Beckett? 157–8

absent God 34–6, 40 Winnie
audience awareness 39 denial 62–3
belief 36–8 image 60
belief and faith 39–40 as metaphor 58–9
boredom 11, 30 persistence 61
context 27, 28 quotations 62
humor 4–5 witnessing
interpretation 38–9 Ill Seen Ill Said 144–5
nothing 29–31 of the unwitnessable 102–4
relationships 31–4 Watt 99–102
religious references 34–5 Woodthorpe, Peter 34–5
repetition 36 worst 151
response, critical and Worstward Ho
audience 28–9 desire and the posthuman
self-awareness 38–9 151–3
time 36–8 elimination of language 152
waste, characters as 64 failing words 149–51
Watt 9 fragmented language 148
character’s need to literature of the unword
interpret 101–2 147
context 96–7 nothing 152
interpreting Knott 104–6 parody 148
madness of order 97–9 reduction of plot and
meaning 17 character 10
nothing 106–7 use of language 6–7
Otherness 103–4, 105 writing 118–23
role of servant 99–100 limit 122
self-awareness 82 as play 119–21
trauma 106–7 unto death 122–3
witnessing 99–102 The Writing of the Disaster 118
witnessing Knott 104–5
witnessing the Zizek, Slavoj 14, 74, 130, 131,
unwitnessable 102–4 149
186

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BECKETT: A GUIDE

FOR THE PERPLEXED

Related titles include:

© Jonathan Boulter 2008

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

ISBN: 978-0-8264-9267-8 (hardback)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India

Part II: Prose

This is dedicated to Mitra Foroutan and Margaret Boulter.

I also thank my students who have endured my enthusiasm for Beckett

I gratefully acknowledge Faber and Faber Ltd for permitting quota-

The following material is used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.:

We need a dreamworld in order to discover the features of the real

BACKGROUND AND INFLUENCE

to transform twentieth-century drama, Waiting for Godot (composed

Vladimir: That passed the time.

At moments of extreme pain in the novels a character will deflate his

‘we are diametrically opposite because Joyce was a synthesizer, he

In Damned to Fame Knowlson quotes Beckett’s views on Joyce:

Worsening words whose unknown. Whence unknown. At all costs

Surely this is some of Beckett’s most challenging, most difficult

THE DIFFICULTY OF READING BECKETT: GENRE,

as Beckett’s primary method of problematizing interpretive proto-

REDUCTION TO THE ESSENTIALS: NOTHINGNESS

can’t write about my work, or occasional stuff of any kind’. He went

But when it comes to these bastards of journalists I feel the only

It is curious to note the way Beckett resists interpreting his work

work in Beckett as points of fundamental, if compromised and opaque,

B.—Yet I speak of an art turning from it in disgust, weary of its

A number of things are crucial here. First, notice how B expresses

word ‘nothing’ gathers a kind of incremental resonance in this final

posit the human’s reason and rationality as being transparently avail-

a mark, of the human’s passing out of existence but—and this is

self is an illusion. Beckett acknowledges these ideas early in his career;

THE PROBLEM OF INTERPRETATION

We notice, for instance, that characters in Beckett recognize they

Beckett’s characters thus function in a state of profound regret and

THEORETICAL APPROACH: THE ‘LITERATURE OF THE

but to imagine that there is a mutual process of interpretation and

THE GERMAN LETTER

It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for

In my estimation the full implications of the Letter, which for me

THE ‘LITERATURE OF THE UNWORD’

of itself (this attempt to eliminate language is geometrically propor-

numerous difficulties, but as we shall discover he never abandons

WAITING FOR GODOT AND ENDGAME

The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary, he will

do these characters inhabit if they are continually looking to the past

WAITING FOR GODOT

The drama of nothing

Probably it is the theater, more than any other mode of repres-

Robbe-Grillet goes on to say that Godot ‘consists of nothing but

cannot allow a play about nothing simply to be a play about nothing.

Ties that bind

Vladimir: You again! Come here till I embraced you.

Estragon: Another day done with.

Estragon’s ‘I don’t know’ is, of course, a complex response to a

Vladimir: Yes, in this immense confusion one thing alone is clear.

The minimum achievement of Vladimir and Estragon has been to

Estragon: We’re not tied?

And of course Beckett literalizes the bondage metaphor with Pozzo