To You

Table of Contents

Table of Contents .............................................................................................................................................. 3 Foreword ........................................................................................................................................................... 4 Chapter One: Introduction.................................................................................................................................. 5 General Background ...................................................................................................................................... 5 Definition of Key Terms .............................................................................................................................. 13 Chapter Two: Self-Deconstructive Motifs ........................................................................................................ 17 Time ............................................................................................................................................................ 18 Death ........................................................................................................................................................... 23 Identity ........................................................................................................................................................ 32 Love ............................................................................................................................................................ 36 Chapter Three: Self-deconstructiveness of Language ....................................................................................... 43 Poetics of Failure ......................................................................................................................................... 44 Reductive Variations to Say the Same Thing ............................................................................................. 45 Shattered Syntax ...................................................................................................................................... 48 Silence ..................................................................................................................................................... 52 Music ....................................................................................................................................................... 54 Translation as Impossible and Necessary...................................................................................................... 58 Chapter Four: Self-deconstructiveness of Imagery............................................................................................ 63 Between Two Worlds: Microcosm/ Macrocosm ........................................................................................... 64 Equivocal Images......................................................................................................................................... 69 Chapter Five: Conclusion................................................................................................................................. 73 Findings ....................................................................................................................................................... 73 Appendices: Poems by Samuel Beckett ............................................................................................................ 76 Works Cited .................................................................................................................................................. 110 Index ............................................................................................................................................................. 113

Foreword
This study tries to describe the deconstructive approach of Beckett towards the motifs, language and imagery in his poems to support Derridas claim regarding Becketts works being self-deconstructive in an interview with Derek Attridge. Beckett has questioned the definition of each of the motifs of time, death, identity, love, language and imagery in his poems by finding their being a supplement to their opposite, and the undecidability in their nature, or elaborating on them in a way that they can be labeled with the terminology of Derrida, although he did not use these terms. The first chapter is an introduction to the case study and methods used in this study. In the second chapter self-deconstructiveness in referring to the motifs of time, death, identity and love is discussed. The third chapter elaborates on self- deconstructive language of the poems; it is divided into Poetics of Failure and Translation as Impossible and Necessary. Under the first section repetition, shattered syntax, silence, and music are discussed. The second section describes the deconstructive translation methods of Beckett. The fourth chapter is dedicated to imagery and its being either related to a place between microcosm and macrocosm, or equivocal with many signifieds, even if it is only related to one of the two realms of inside or outside worlds. The last chapter sums up all the ideas and findings of the research. Herewith, I would like to thank my family for their life-time support, and my professors, especially Dr Amir Ali Nojoumian and Dr Jalal Sokhanvar, for sharing with me open-heartedly their time and knowledge throughout this study. I hope this work can be a satisfactory response to their efforts.

November 2010

Leila Samadi Rendy

Chapter One: Introduction

General Background
Beckett was born in Foxrock, Dublin. He would later insist that he was born on Good Friday, 13 April 1906, although his birth certificate puts the date a month later. The Becketts were of French Huguenot descent and, after a distinguished career at Trinity College, Dublin, he was to spend much of his life in France. His cricketing prowess earned him a mention in Wisden (the only Nobel Prize winner there), while he topped his year in modern languages. In 1928, he was appointed to an exchange lectureship in Paris, where he met and helped James Joyce before returning to TCD in 1930. A critical study of Marcel Proust (1931) pointed to an academic career, but Beckett chose to become a full-time writer. He travelled widely, living rather precariously, before settling in Montparnasse in Paris in 1937. His comic novel Murphy was published in 1938. He also met Suzanne Dumesnil, when she helped him to hospital after a street stabbing; they were to marry in 1961. Beckett was in Dublin at the outbreak of World War II, but preferred France at war to Ireland at peace. He worked for the French Resistance, narrowly escaped the Gestapo, then moved to unoccupied France, where he wrote his novel Watt. 5

In 1947, he returned to Paris, where within two years he wrote his trilogy of novels. Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, and the play Waiting for Godot. By now, he was writing in French, then translating into English. Godot had its first production in 1953, and its success made the reclusive Beckett an international figure. In this innovative tragi-comedy, the tramps Vladimir and Estragon await someone they have never met and who may not exist. If I knew who Godot was, said Beckett, I would have said so in the play. Other bleakly comic plays followed: Endgame and Happy Days. Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, but shunned the presentation ceremony. He died in Paris on 22 December 1989. Beckett's work is stark, fundamentally minimalist, and according to some interpretations deeply pessimistic about the human condition. He is mostly known for his dramas, novels, and short fictions, but his poetry is of significance too. Beckett himself formed a low opinion of his youthful verse which he described as "showing off", yet he kept it in print. One reason may have been that he began as a poet and, in a manner commoner in France than in England, continued to think of himself as such, even after he had virtually abandoned poetry for prose. It cannot be said that Beckett is a great poet but the poems embody all the themes of his outstanding prose writings: love, time, individuality, death, emptiness of life and as a result emptiness of language are some main themes in Becketts works in general, and specially his poems. The poems are occasionally discussed by the critics, but his art in general has been the concern of most of the philosophers and critics of the age. However what is still surprising is that Jacques Derrida, one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century and the well known founder of Deconstruction, never wrote anything on Beckett, although they seem so close in ideas about life and language. Derrida is a contemporary French philosopher who inaugurated the school of deconstruction. Deconstructionism, a body of ideas closely associated with post-structuralism and post-modernism, is a strategy of analysis that has been applied primarily to linguistics, literature, and philosophy. Derrida published three major works in 1967 which introduced his radical approach to texts: Speech and Phenomena, Of Grammatology, and Writing and Differance. His greatest influence has been in philosophy and literary criticism in the United States where the above works were translated and published in the 1970's.

In 1930, Jacques Derrida was born to Sephardic Jewish parents in Algeria. After military service in France, he began his studies in philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris in 1952. Derrida attended Harvard on scholarship in 1956-57. He was a lecturer in philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris from 1960-1964, then he was professor of philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure from 1965-1984. Derrida was the founding director of the College International de Philosophie in Paris, and was most recently the directeur d'etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. For more than a decade, beginning in 1975, Derrida lectured regularly in the United States at Johns Hopkins, Yale, Cornell, and the University of California at Irvine. Derrida's ideas inspired the critical skepticism associated with the so called Yale School of deconstruction (Carrigan 1). He died in October 2004. Jacques Derrida's main concern was to critique metaphysics and its impact on the theory and practice of philosophy and writing. He rejected two main characteristics of Western philosophy: meaning is grounded in metaphysical presence, and time is oriented to its end (Craig 2). In his interview with Derek Attridge, Jacques Derrida once claimed that Beckett's writing was already so self-deconstructive that there was not much left to do. Derrida had already stated that Beckett's texts make the limits of language tremble. Referring briefly to Beckettian composition, rhetoric, construction and rhythm, even in his most decomposed works, Derrida called them remainders of a thematic exhausted. This is important in light of the fact that this is the only instance of Derrida's comment on such a widely-discussed writer as Beckett. Derrida claimed, in that interview, that he felt too close to Beckett and attributed this closeness to how they wrote in a foreign language. But apart from this seemingly apparent identification, he stated some crucial words about the ambivalent function of nihilism: "a certain nihilism is both interior to metaphysics (the final fulfillment of metaphysics, Heidegger would say) and then, already, beyond. With Beckett, the two possibilities are in the greatest proximity and competition. He is nihilist and he is not nihilist." To capture an object of study in such an impossible situation is typical of Derrida's analysis. In deconstructing a concept, Derrida usually questions the validity of binary opposition that are so much internalized by people that they are mostly taken for granted. Seizing a concept, whatever it is, in a moment when it both exists and does not exist; Derrida refuses the idea of binary oppositions and reaches a moment of undecidability. This is the general way that his deconstruction works. Again, in the light of Derrida's notion of how Beckett makes the limits of language tremble, one can simply read the famous allegory of wall, which is described by Beckett as an explanation of how his texts 7

work. Beckett once had stated that he was like a man at a wall who was laboriously pressing his head against the wall in order to get beyond it. He had proposed that the only possibility for such a man to get beyond the wall is that the wall moved a little further. The undecidable state of being/non- being, which is crucial to Derrida in deconstruction, also constitutes a central part of Beckett's oeuvre. When Derrida confesses to his silence about Beckett's work, he disapproves of transcending or reducing Beckett's work to any philosophical idea. Derrida's silence with regard to Beckett could be taken as his critique of the very idea of Beckett industry. Beckett's work escapes all intellectual reformulations. He calls it the academic malady. This is also evident in his opposing to the idea of representation in his interview with Georges Duthuit. He has suggested there that the artist should be concerned with his medium. This is exactly what he does in his work. In fact, by creating a nonlanguage, he creates an other for the language itself in his work. Proposing his poetics of failure, Beckett could be seen as having created a language that never goes beyond itself to express or to represent an idea. His language is self-referential because literature, in his view is run out of ideas and tools to express ideas. Beckett industry has actively forgotten this and continues to unveil Beckett, by resorting to the concerns imposed by any age on the critic. This passion of unveiling to cultivate Beckett's field with meaning is the opposite of what he wanted to accomplish: creating art from sterility. This research seeks to show correspondences between Derrida's conceptions and Beckett's motifs; affinities between their treatment of language and its relation to the reality. Becketts art is delogocentric according to Jennifer Martin, because logos neither as speech and language, nor as logic are the centers of his works, and poems are not exceptions (14). According to Derrida, the solution to the "quandary" of the existential vertigo that is caused from anti-foundationalism or the lack of reliable truth in life would be to revel in a "Nietzchean affirmation." That is, to view the destruction of metaphysics, of foundationalism, not as stemming from a loss of center but possessing a non-center: "This affirmation then determines the non-center otherwise than as loss of center. And it plays the game without security" (Grammatology 80). Another aim of this research is focusing on Becketts poetry which is not less selfdeconstructive than his other works, but less appreciated. His novels or dramas are so discussed but his poetry is practically put aside. There are a few articles and just one book (Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic by Harvey) on his poems, but libraries on his prose. Of course it is because of the immaturity of 8

his poems comparing to his prose, and the relative difficulty in access to some poems, due to the abandonment of reprinting by the poet (the researcher has collected all the English and French poem and translated the French ones which are not translated by the author or the others into English, and attached to this research for the ease of reference of the reader). But it does not mean that they lack the main concerns of Beckett and any significance. Beckett's famecoupled with the Nobel Prize in Literature that he won in 1969 and which he and his wife considered to be a catastrophemeant that academic interest in his life and work grew, creating eventually something of a Beckett industry. Other writers also started to seek out Beckett. The reception of Samuel Beckett's texts has from the start been an international business. During his lifetime, Beckett's peculiar status as an Irish writer who lived most of his adult life in France, writing in both English and French, translated into dozens of languages, and staged in dozens of countries, marked him out as a thoroughly international writer. His work has generated one of the most voluminous international libraries of critical commentary on any author in the history of world literature. Turnover in Beckett critical industry is now so high that compelling bibliographies by country of production has become not only a practical possibility but also an academic necessity. In this Beckett Industry, a lot of philosophers and critical thinkers turned to Beckett's work to analyze. Indeed, Beckett was mostly referred to by thinkers who read his work in favor of their theories. It is noteworthy that the most influential thinkers of the 20th century have commented on his work: Theodore W. Adorno, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Wolfgang Iser, Julia Kristeva and many others, except for Derrida who has just mentioned in his interview with Attridge his closeness or wish to closeness to Beckett. Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic by Lawrence Harvey is the main resource for the study of Becketts poetry, as it is the only book completely dedicated to this subject. A close reading of all the poems is included in this book, relating the themes to the other works of Beckett. Although readings are not in light of deconstruction, but because of Becketts work being self-deconstructive, most of the topics are in line with the concern of this research. Richard Lane, in Beckett and Philosophy, examines and interrogates the relationships between Samuel Beckett's works and contemporary French and German thought. There are two wide-ranging overview chapters by Richard Begam (Beckett and Postfoundationalism) and Robert Eaglestone (Beckett via Literary and Philosophical Theories), and individual chapters on Beckett, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Badiou, Merleau-Ponty, Adorno, Habermas, Heidegger and Nietzsche. The 9

collection takes a fresh look as issues such as postmodern and poststructuralist thought in relation to Beckett studies, providing useful overview chapters and original essays. The most important part of this book for the purpose of this research is the chapter on Derrida in which the writer focuses on the "edges of language" which is in turn discussed here in light of the "displacements of the limits of language". Paul Davis's Beckett and Eros, Death of Humanism is the first to propose a mythopoetics of sex with which to explore Beckett's work as a whole. The decade since Beckett's death has seen new interests in the erotic sweeping through our culture, acting in uneasy counterpoint to its established humanistic infrastructure and opening new questions about the significance of sexuality. Surprisingly or not, Beckett has startling further light to throw on the erotic phenomenon variously but insistently recognized in our time. The last chapter of this book " That Unheeded Neither (neither)" offers an interpretation of the poem "neither" on the basis of the notion of desire which according to this study is a shaping undecidable element in Beckett's characters. The overall importance of this book to this research is the way it places Beckett in an anti-humanist position, which is a poststructuralist and deconstructionist project. There are some few articles on Becketts poetry as well, which are will be used in this work. Besides, some books by Derrida or on the concept of Deconstruction like Stockers Routledge Philosophy Guide Book to Derrida on Deconstruction and Royles Deconstructions will be employed in this study. The primary sources of this research will be the related books of Derrida to this subject and Becketts collections of poems, as well as a few prose writings of him which are close in form and content to the poems (for example Unnamable and Disjecta). This book consists of five chapters three of which are considered as main chapters which elaborate on the poems of Beckett supporting their being self-deconstructive: the poet deconstructs some general motifs of life, language and images in the poems. The second chapter is on the poetry of Beckett and his Self-deconstructive Motifs including Time, Death, Identity, and Love. Time heads never-ending end, it is repetitive and leads to purgatory and waiting, as man is always in the beginning of his way, and the proper time for him to take an action in his life is always to come. This is what Derrida defines as diffrance. Death is the state of silence and paralysis, which is both desired and undesired, and can be experienced in the life. This deconstructs the binary opposition between life and death. The threshold of them shifts but it cannot be really passed, and man is always on this threshold. Identity of man is always on the threshold too: the 10

threshold of the selfhood and otherness. Even love has a threshold nature as the man always stands on the borderline of true love and pretentious or physical love. They are supplementary and cannot be separated from each other. The third chapter is entitled Self-deconstructiveness of Language: This research will focus on the language itself as the main source of the undecidability of the text, through Poetics of Failure which is characteristic of Beckett's writing and includes Reductive Variations to Say the Same Thing or repetition, Shattered Syntax, Silence, and Music. The originality an experience or a word dissolves in the several repetitions, but this does not happen exactly in Becketts art, any repeated word or idea is new as its context changes. Any repeated thing is new besides being old. This is

deconstructing of the definition of repetition. Shattered syntax of the poems leads to the lack of closure and many readings. Besides, through this reduced syntax, the poet takes the language to its edge, although it cannot pas it as it is impossible. No matter how minimalistic the syntax is, it is still language, and is rhetorical. But it is rhetoric against rhetoric, against itself. The silence which is desired in some poems is at the same time undesirable as it means non-being. Even when desired, silence is unattainable, as there is no way out of language. Music is the most powerful way of utterance. It is beyond language and translation and is universal. Beckett gets to music in his poems through repetition; he uses words as musical notes, he uses language against itself. In this chapter Becketts translation of his own poems or the poems of the other poets will be discussed as well. Becketts translated texts are new and original texts besides being the translation of a text. He considers his translation of the others as his own works, and by sequence his translation of himself is a new poetic creation of him. It is due to the impossibility of a mere translation and its necessity discussed by Derrida. The Fourth chapter is Self-deconstructiveness of Imagery in which Equivocal Images and their belonging to a world Between Two Worlds: Microcosm/ Macrocosm will be discussed. The reader cannot decide whether the speaker of the poems is talking of his inner world or the world outside, and share the undecidability of him. Even in the poems that the reader can decisively tell the speaker is talking of the world outside, the many implications of a single image leaves him with aporia. Last chapter is dedicated to summing up the results of the analyses and getting to findings regarding the main focuses of the study. The relationship between the ideas of Derrida and Beckett, as he has shown them in his poetry will be clarified generally in this chapter, while in the previous chapters it has been done in detail, using examples from the works of these two great figures. 11

This five-chapter research is based on library and electronic sources. As it is discussed above, the approach for my analyses will be based on deconstruction. For the purpose of deconstructing texts, it is assumed, at first, that they rely on some metaphysical framework which is inclined to establish a hierarchical order within the text in the form of binary oppositions of values, a hierarchy of value or truth which allows the writer to exclude from the field of discourse those connotations or meanings which do not accord with the privileged terms. The deconstruction goes on, then, to reverse the hierarchy by finding evidences in the text which allow this reversal. At last, this newly established hierarchy is, in turn, broken up in order to prove the indeterminacy of meaning or unavailability of any ultimate meanings in the text which is subject to the effects of diffrance in language and aporias of discourse. To reveal a text's undecidability is to show that the meaning of the text is really an indefinite, undecidable, plural, conflicting array of possible meanings. In this case selfdeconstructiveness of Beckett's poetry is the interest of study and it will be shown that Beckett's text provides different interpretations and paradoxical aspects in it. These interpretations and circumstances conflict with each other which lead to more interpretations. For instance, majority of critics believe that Time is one of the main concerns. Time is introduced as both healer (through habit) and killer (through memory). This logic of "both A and not-A" is extremely important to undermine the foundations of binary oppositions at work in the text. According to Tyson in Critical Theory Today

In deconstruction, undecidability of the text does not mean that the reader is unable to choose among possible interpretations. And it does not mean that the text cannot decide as to what it wants to say. Rather, it means that the text and the reader, alike, are inextricably bound within language's dissemination of meanings. That is, reader and text are interwoven threads in the perpetually working loom of language. Specific meanings are just moments of meaning that give way, inevitably to more meanings. (130)

Every literary text lends itself to deconstruction as there are black holes and contradictions in them all. According to J. Hillis Miller the four important things a deconstructionist mentions in reading a text are: 1. The idiosyncrasy of texts and knowing it singular 2. The details 3. Finding a problem and contradiction or, according to Derrida, a black hole, in the text (It differs from one critic to the other). 12

4. Speech act theory, which sees a performative aspect in literature and asks for a responsible reading (Miller 171-185). So there is not any methodology to apply Deconstruction to literature. There are just the few mentioned points to be considered, which Lois Tyson states should be characterized in four steps to be taken to reveal the undecidability in a text and so apply deconstruction to it:
Note all the various interpretations the text seems to offer 1. show the ways in which these interpretations conflict with one another 2. show how these conflicts produce still more interpretations, which produce still more conflicts, which produce still more interpretations 3. Use step #1, #2, and #3 to argue for the texts undecidability. (135)

Therefore, in this research the poems of Beckett will be read in this way and its being deconstructive will be shown. It is not a difficult work as Beckett has exaggerated the deconstructive themes and has done the duty of critic himself. But still his ideas are implied in the poetic language which should be paraphrased. Another method taken up here is to establish a correspondence between Derrida's terminology of deconstruction and Beckettian motifs: For instance, correspondences between Beckett's purgatory and Derrida's abyss or aporia; between Beckett's ethics of waiting and Derrida's notion of diffrance. In this way, poetics of failure, as described by Beckett, as an eternal recurrence of ending the same thing, could be read as the postponement of the ultimate meaning and promises to coming of "other". Each waiting is different and makes a kind of insatiable desire in the waiter, but as the coming is always deferred it undergoes the matter of diffrance. Waiting is a kind of Death in life and by this Beckett finds the binary opposition of Death/Life vicious as they are supplement of each other. But it has to be warned repeatedly through this research that these correspondences are not to confirm that Beckett uses the same tools as Derrida to criticize metaphysics of presence in Western culture.

Definition of Key Terms

Aporia From the Greek, meaning, literally, the absence of a passage, and hence a perplexing difficulty or state of being at a loss, aporia denotes in rhetoric a figure in which the speaker or writer expresses doubt about how or where to begin a discourse, or how to overcome a particular problem or obstacle. For deconstructive criticism, it is precisely around such moments of doubt or apparently unresolvable 13

problems that reading orients itself. For Derrida, as for the criticism of Paul de Man, it is these textual gaps or stumbling-blocks to which we must pay attention (Sim 120).

Binary oppositions The use of binary opposition in analyzing phenomena is highly characteristic of structuralism, and one of the aspects of its methodology that is most vigorously attacked by post-structuralist critics, thus in Lvi-Strauss, nature and culture are set in opposition to each other as mutually exclusive categories, such that given examples of human behavior must belong to one or other category but not both. Lvi-Strauss proceeds to run into problems with the incest taboo, which he is forced to admit does seem to belong to both categories. For Derrida, this is an admission that calls into question the whole structuralist project, the methodology of which is seen to be faulty. Poststructuralists like Derrida also consider that the principle of binary opposition (either one thing or its opposite number) depends on a notion of fixed identity that no longer tenable; as far as they are concerned, identity is a much more fluid phenomenon than structuralists would like to believe (Sim 127).

Diffrance Against the metaphysics of presence, deconstruction brings a (non)concept called diffrance. This French neologism is, on the deconstructive argument, properly neither a word nor a concept; it names the non-coincidence of meaning both synchronically (one French homonym means "differing") and diachronically (another French homonym means "deferring"). Because the resonance and conflict between these two French meanings is difficult to convey tersely in English, the word diffrance is usually left untranslated. In simple terms, this means that rather than privileging commonality and simplicity and seeking unifying principles (or grand teleological narratives, or overarching concepts, etc.) deconstruction emphasizes difference, complexity, and non- self-identity (Carrigan 7).

Erasure Erasure is a deconstructionist technique whereby a word or term is used, but what it commits one to (its meaning, as well as the theory of meaning lying behind it) is denied, or, as Jacques Derrida puts it, placed under erasure (sous rature).This enable Derrida to claim that he can use the language of Western philosophy without that use committing him to a belief in its concepts or any of its principles. 14

The practice is derived from Martin Heidegger, who in Zur Seinsfrage used the word being with a line drawn through it, in order to signal that he did not want to be drawn into debates about the concept, since that would imply his acceptance of Western philosophys metaphysical assumptions about being. Erasure is one of the ways Derrida attempts to answer what has become a standard criticism of his work: that he relies on language to put his arguments across, while simultaneously claiming that language is unable and meaning indeterminate. Critics have pointed out that Derridas critique of language could not be understood unless language and meaning were at least relatively stable. Seen from that latter perspective, the technique of erasure is something of a confidence trick (Sim 137).

Hymen The word hymen refers to the interplay between inside and outside. The hymen is the membrane of intersection where it becomes impossible to distinguish whether the membrane is on the inside or the outside. And in the absence of the hymen (as in, once the hymen is penetrated), the distinction between inside and outside disappears. Thus, in a way, the hymen is neither inside nor outside, and both inside and outside (Sim 145).

Iterability The necessary repeatability of any item experienced as meaningful, which at the same time can never be repeated exactly since it has no essence that could remain unaffected by the potentially infinite contexts (which are always contexts within contexts) into which it could be grafted ( Derrida, Acts 18).

Logocentrism From Plato to Kant, philosophers and theologians have struggled for a solution which adequately solved the riddle of the relationship between the noumena and the phenomena, between the spiritual world and the material world, between an-other-world and world. Derrida's approach was radically different. His approach was a brilliant, though flawed, attack on the very foundations of philosophy. Rather than attempt to sort out how it was that in any sense the other-world was present in this world, or how occupants of this world might have some knowledge about the other-world, Derrida claimed that the other-world (if it actually was) and this world are irreducibly different. He also argued that constituents of the other-world should not have a privileged status in this world (Carrigan 10). 15

Deconstruction identifies in the Western philosophical tradition a "logocentrism" or "metaphysics of presence" (also known as phallogocentrism) which holds that speech-thought (the logos) is a privileged, ideal, and self-present entity, through which all discourse and meaning are derived. This logocentrism is the primary target of deconstruction (Sim 169).

Pharmakon The word pharmakon refers to the play between cure and poison. It derives from the ancient Greek word, used by Plato in Phaedrus and Phaedo, which had an undecidable meaning which could be translated to mean anything ranging from a drug, recipe, spell, medicine, or poison (Sim 183).

Supplement According to Derrida, the Western idea of the supplement has within it the idea that a thing that has a supplement cannot be truly "complete in itself". If it were complete without the supplement, it shouldn't need, or long-for, the supplement. The fact that a thing can be added-to to make it even more "present" or "whole" means that there is a hole (which Derrida called an originary lack) and the supplement can fill that hole. The metaphorical opening of this "hole" Derrida called invagination. From this perspective, the supplement does not enhance something's presence, but rather underscores its absence (Sim 192).

Trace Derrida defines trace as what a sign differs/defers from. It is the absent part of the sign's presence. In other words, through the act of diffrance, a sign leaves behind a trace, which is whatever is left over after everything present has been accounted for (Sim 200).

16

Chapter Two: Self-Deconstructive Motifs

Beckett and Derrida questioned the definition of common motifs like time, death, identity, and love. They expressed the impossibility hidden in different sides of these issues. They have both shown the contradiction in each of these themes, which make them impossible, and have expressed mans inevitable compromising with living the impossible. The human condition in the world has been the main concern of these two great thinkers. To them man is always standing on the threshold of any opposition in life. There is no priority and hierarchy. There can be no decision and good choice. The only thing is undecidability and the ability to tolerate it, which is close to impossible. This constantly elaborating on the contradictions in the world and giving no clue and answer to the problem, as there is not any, leads the reader of these two to aporia. Their works deconstruct both the subjects it is about, and itself: they are conscious of the contradictions in their own beliefs and they express it freely. The difference between Beckett and other writers, whose works are deconstructed by Derrida and other deconstructionalistsalthough Derrida does not believe in this termis that they are unaware of the paradoxes in their works and ideas, and the critic sheds light on it. There are some gaps in their works, which show the authors are unconsciously deconstructing the motifs in their work. The critic finds the gaps and through them gets to the core of authors belief and explains it. Beckett does the job of the critic himself. That is why Derrida agrees with the claim of Derek Attridge concerning self17

deconstructiveness of Becketts works. Below, this idea will be discussed in the motifs of time, death, identity, and love in the poems of Beckett.

Time
One should not necessarily flee or condemn circularity as one would a bad repetition, a vicious circle, a regressive or sterile process. One must, in a certain way of course, inhabit the circle, turn around in it, live there a feast of thinking and the gift, the gif of thinking. (Derrida, Given Time 9)

What is time? It does not have any specific essence, it is not a thing to be given or taken, although we use these verbs for it, as Derrida discusses in his Given Time. In addition, in Apories he claims that time (present) is non-existing and impossible. All we have is the dream of future and the memory of the past, and the present time is just the Hymen of these two. On the other hand, what is past or future but the stream of the non-existing present? The problem is not just in defining time; in fact, this indefinable subject is the most dominant issue in the life of man. Time is treated as both killer and healer: the adjectives Beckett has attributed to time in his critical essay Proust. The womb is the grave due to the passage of time: after a while, the one in the womb is to live in the world and at last die and sleep in a grave. This life-giving time is at the same time death-giving. This is what Derrida calls Pharmakon function. Another idea about time is its repetitive nature. Drive of life is the repetition, or as Derrida puts it Repetition Compulsion, returning to, and restoring the origin, which is death and ignorance (Derrida, Post Card 335-338). Death and birth are equal to Derrida. Becketts idea about time is the same, and proofs for this claim will be brought from his poems. Besides, one of the other issues appearing in this uncertainty in defining time, and consequently life, is Paralysis. Finding this definition is a matter of Diffrance and makes waiting inevitable. No certain answer can be found for the question of what time and life is, and what one should do not knowing the meaning life, thus man encounters the aporias of purgatory and undecidability. Man does not know when is the best time to do something and take a step in his life, so he is always waiting for that proper time to come. Becketts first piece of published writing is his poem Whoroscope with the main theme of time. This shows that the subject of time is of great importance to the poet. In that poem, Descartes 18

escape from the end of his time of living and its impossibility is elaborated. He was always scared of his horoscope and never revealed his date of birth because he was afraid of the prediction of his time of death and its coming truealthough he wanted to show off that he does not believe in metaphysics. Forgetting it does not change the authority of time over mans life; there is no escape from death. In the above-mentioned poem, Whoroscope, the pharmakonic essence of time is discussed. In the poem egg and Descartes habit of eating it between 8 to 11days after its being laid is repeated several times. He used to believe that before 8 days, the egg is not ready to be eaten and after about 11 days, it goes bad. Therefore, the very time that makes it good is the time that corrupts it. Besides, one should always wait for the proper time to come in his life for everything. Beckett speaks of the repetitiveness of time in his poems. To focus on Whoroscope, the idea of egg as both grave and womb conveys the idea of times repeating itself and that the beginning and the end of mans life is the same. Even while he considers himself in the prime of his youth, he is imprisoned in a world, which resembles a womb, a grave, an egg. Another example of the repetitiveness of time and life from Becketts poems is in Home Olga. This poem is about Joyce and by putting together the initial letter of each line, one can get to his name even. In this poem Beckett in a ridiculing and comic manner writes Yesterday shall be tomorrow/ riddle me that my rapparee; time can repeat itself and there is no riddle and doubt in that according to him. In Death of A.D. the speaker complains of the passage of time and death. The poet is mourning a friend whose names initial is A.D. But A.D. reminds us of the time after Christ. Therefore, time is dead to the speaker too. The speaker thinks of getting rid of time, which is impossible:
being there in fleeing not and fleeing being there bent towards the confession of expiring time

Death is the crime of time, and it is repeating itself, like the lives of man. Each going has a return and this vicious circle of life lasts forever: the unpardonable crime of time/gripping old wood the witness of departures/witness of returns. As Derrida puts it in Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, Time would always be a process or a movement in the form of the circle or sphere (8). There is no way out of the circle and any part where one calls the end is the beginning point and vise versa. In Cascando, first it seems that the poet refers to a final end as impossible and inevitable. This end is not the end of time or even ones time, it is the end of the time of the illusion of the perpetual love. 19

saying again there is a last even of last times . . . a last even of last times of saying if you do not love me I shall not be loved if I do not love you I shall not love

This becomes clearer when the poem gets to its end and the speaker clearly declares that he is not in the mentioned illusion any more and knows that he may be in love with someone else, although it is not desired for him.
terrified again of not loving of loving and not you of being loved and not by you

This poem is another example of the two opposite and contradicting functions of time. Time which has given man the chance of love and made in him the belief in the eternal pure love, shows him after a while that such a thing does not exist and that love is just thud of the old plunger/pestling the unalterable/whey of words. So time is the source of the marvelous illusions and painful disillusionments. In Thither the repetition of the limited words of the poem, alongside the content, which is about the repetitiveness of nature and mans pain and desire, show Becketts belief in the circularity of life and time. First Stanza Thither A far cry For one So little Fair daffodils March then Third Stanza Then thence Daffodils Again March then Again A far cry Again For one So little As indicated in this table, most of the words and phrases in the third stanza are the repetition of that of the first ones. The second stanza is there then/ there then. This stanza has the repetitive 20

essence as well. The only thing which is not repeated is fairthence is not repeated but then is so close in meaning, so it can be considered as repeated. May be the speaker wants to suggest that the only thing which occurs once is mans feeling the fairness and beauty by heart. The second time man finds love and beauty, he does not have all the feeling he had in his first encounter, as Beckett has mentioned here and in First Love. The poem constantly refers to a specific time and place and someone whose cry comes from far away. It shows the desire in the speaker to get to a certainty about time and place in life and his need for another voice, which is always to come and is different from others, the voice of someone who can give life and time a meaning according to Derrida in his Cinders. However, all these quests are repetitive and useless, but the speaker cannot stop searching for a meaning. Finding a meaning for time is aporiaic to him. The poet has meditated on a last even of last times in Cascando; the speculation becomes reality at Dieppe, as the ebb tide rolls in and out again. In the other three poems of Quatre Poemes the named location disappears, but the threshold situation (these long shifting thresholds as Beckett calls them) remains. The third poem envisages a transfer from a situation in which (as Fin de Partie puts it) quelque chose suit son cours to one which can be apprehended and lived through as an instant. But time cannot be divorced from space, as the translation of le temps dune porte (the space of a door) obliquely admits, and as the fourth poem makes clear. The reiteration of a quotidian reality where to be lasts but an instant is accompanied by a heavily rhetorical plea for external reality, general and particular: what would I do without this world . . . without this wave . . . without this silence . . . without this sky. The rhetoric is suspiciously fulsome and is exploded by the bitterness of the second half of the poem. But the structure is not as simple as this; there is, in the first half, a gradual move away from the phenomenal towards the eternal. Wave and sky seem to be less a part of an externally perceived reality than a reality created by the recording consciousness. Only a world behind what the second poem calls ce rideau de brume qui recule, a world that only gives one back the image of oneself (because it can do no more) but which constantly asserts itself as outside oneself (because it can do no less), is desired by the poet. Without an apocalypse (this wave where in the end / body and shadow are engulfed) life would be meaningless repetition, with an eye constantly seeking outside itself an image of solace that can only have been spun from inside itself. Thus the perception of space (and of objects in space) becomes convulsive. As a corollary, the imagining of a figure/companion who might bring solace involves the poet in facing and giving oblique utterance to 21

his essential loneliness. The minimal distortion of vision is better expressed in the French because a more neutral (though more rigid) syntax allows identities to remain shadowy, whereas in English the dislocations of subject and object are felt to be forced (Pilling, 179). The last poem of the first French collection is another good example of the repetitiveness of time from the ancient time to the present.
even in the cavern sky and earth and one by one the ancient voices from beyond the grave and slowly the same light . . . and the same laws as not so long ago

The ancient voices go back beyond the outre-tombe of Chateaubriand to the plains of Enna where Proserpine was ravished by Pluto. But the reassurance of invoking classical myth proves only a momentary bulwark for the microcosm. For the old dichotomies persist in the cavernous depths of the self; there is the same tension of sky and earth, the same light that consumes the darkness, the same laws of attraction and repulsion. Then, in a ricorso more daunting than that at the beginning of Dieppe, or the one in the central section of Cascando, there is always the bouche d'ombre:

slowly from far off extinguishing Proserpine and Atropos

It is an even more uncertain void than the mouth of hell (Pilling, 177). A very clear example of purgatory and paralysis in Beckett is his poem La Mouche (the fly). In this poem, the poet is even unable to decide whether he is to kill a disturbing fly or not. Derrida discusses this in his Aporie Finis, Mourir-SAttendre Aux limites de la Verite . In the third poem of the first French collection lying in bed, awaiting his satisfaction, the poet projects himself into the climax of the near future:
to be there jawless toothless where the pleasure of loss is lost together with the scarcely inferior one of gain

Here the speaker even cannot enjoy, and waits for another time to come at which he can be satisfied.

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In the fourth poem of the first French collection, Ascension, speaker uses the phrase always too young. This indicates that according to him no time is proper; one should always wait for the proper time to come in his life (Harvey, 188). In the first poem of the second French collection, Beckett writes:
you would want me coming from A to B I cannot I cannot exit I am in a trackless country yes yes it is a beautiful thing you have there a good beautiful thing what is it that does not ask me more questions spiral dust of instants what is it that is the same

Here again the poet speaks of the repetitiveness of time, its being indefinable and the purgatory it leads to. The speaker is imprisoned in the loop of time and cannot escape from it; he even cannot make a slight movement from A to B. Therefore, according to Beckett, time is always repeating itself, and by sequence, mans life is like a loop and he is always standing at the beginning, which is the end at the same time. Time, which has given man life, is the source of death to him too. Another important faculty Beckett finds in time is its never being proper and leading man to an eternal waiting for the proper time. Derrida agrees with all these claims as it is discussed above. Derrida, like Beckett, finds time pharmakonic, repetitive and leading to waiting as a matter of diffrance. This shows the closeness of these two thinkers, of which Derrida speaks in his interview with Attridge.

Death
and we know none we know nothing at all the singing of the dead mouths dies on the shore he traveled there is nothing in crying (Beckett, First Poem of the Second French Collection)

Death to Beckett is a part of daily life: everyone is dying from the very moment they begin to live in the womb of his mother. This does not simply mean that he is getting closer to the time of his death, to a border, but it shows that man is always on the threshold of life and death, so he is neither dead nor alive, besides being both dead and alive at the same time. Life is unknown to Beckett, and therefore, death as a part of it, is unknown too. The only thing he knows about death is that silence and lethargy 23

are equal to death, the thing man always experiences, and even long for it. So every person in the world is willing and at the same time scared of death, and Beckett is not an exception. Man has a love and hate relation with death. There are times when Beckett refers to death as a border and threshold of life and death, but he does not talk about the territory of death. Crossing the river and getting to another shore, as he refers to in Malcoda, is the end of floating on it, or standing on the bank of the river in the land of life. But what is on the other side? He does not know. If death is lethargy, the passenger will remain at the other shore in silence, just like what he did in the land of Life. He is still standing on the threshold, but it has moved a little, as Beckett refers to in the so-called allegory of wall. Derrida discusses about death in several essays and books and agrees with Beckett in his view of death. For example, in his essay Apories he discusses that Death is passing the line, which is impossible but a common fault. And where is this border? It is both in and out of life. At that place, being and non-being are mingled and are supplementary for each other. To him life and death are dependant to each other and each needs the other to be defined. Without a border between them, they cannot be separated and defined so the border is necessary. But crossing the border is necessary too to define the border. Thus, this crossing the line is necessary and impossible, as it is not a mere crossing and getting far. Therefore, there is affinity between the ideas of Beckett and Derrida in the subject of Death. This will be supported by tracing the deconstructive issues about this subject in the poems of Beckett. The third poem of the second French collection opens with the binary opposition of life and death and throughout the poem it becomes clear that each of the two sides of this opposition is dependant and inseparable from the other.
live dead my lonely season read blank chrysanthemum lively nests abandoned mud of the leaves of April beautiful days gray of frost

Besides every beautiful and lively scene, there exists the death reminding ugly image. The lonely spring is the live season of death for the speaker; he finds loneliness as death. April is the life-giving month of the year but besides the flowers and sunshine, the speaker finds mud and gray frost disturbing this beauty. Life and death are mingled and the season, which is full of life, can be the month of death for the lonely speaker. 24

Three last poems of Echos Bones due to the death of Becketts father are about death. In Malacoda the poet is talking about the image of death as sailing on a river in a boat the sailor of which is the mythical figure, Malacoda, whose responsibility was to take the dead to the Underground through the River of Hades. The phases of preparing a dead body for leaving the land of living people, and mourning of the mother is shown with an affirmative and at the same time negating tone.
must it be it must be it must be find the weeds engage them in the garden hear she may see she need not

Death and mourning are inevitable and a law, but at the same time undesired and unnecessary. The poem is full of the words and images, which shows the sorrow of the death of the beloved father and husband. Death is evil and so far from life. The dead should leave to a land of demonic death and the living will suffer their loss. This image of trip is again shown at the end of the poem.
all aboard all souls half-mast aye aye nay

The last line is the common phrase sailors shout when they want to ask everyone to get into the ship or boat, and the response of the speaker at first is affirmative, aye, but then negating, nay. Harvey in Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic discusses this subject as follows:
The final nay, set apart from the rest of the poem, negates not only the preceding line but the whole poem. There is no reason to lower the flag to half-mast in sign of mourning. Death is not a penalty but a welcome release from cruelty of life. Thus Malacoda is an ambivalent title, because for the dead man at least the end is not an evil but a blessingIn Becketts Humanistic scheme, however, compassion is central, compassion not for the dead, but for the living, who suffer in the earthly inferno of life. (112)

According to him, the poet negates his first belief concerning death as a sad end and sorrowful mourning of the living. That is right, but this negation does not mean that the speaker has found a solution for the problem of death and mourning, he is only doubtful. The strong effect of the last nay is equal to the effect of the many words describing the horrible death and mourning, so the speaker is in the situation of aporia in being mourner or not, in making a hierarchy out of the binary opposition of life/death. Da tagte es reinterprets the crucial awakening moment of Walther von der Vogelweide's alba, Nemt, frowe disen kranz in terms of death, where Walthers aim had been to show the perfection of love destroyed by contact with harsh reality. Beckett allows the idea of a lovers parting to remain behind the image of his father laid in a winding sheet in an open coffin (Pilling, 169). The

25

major work of dislocation is carried out by the third line who have no more for the land, as can be seen by omitting it and rearranging the order of lines:
the sheet astream in your hand 2 and the glass unmisted above your eyes 4 redeem the surrogate goodbyes 1

Sheet has the sexual connotation as well as its funeral and farewell ones. So may be Beckett plays with the Renaissance usage of the word die, to refer both to death and to lovemaking. Thus death is a unification and at the same time parting. If we want to take the image of the winding sheet a sexual one, then the third line of the poem, who have no more for the land, and its clear death and departure meaning is put beside the lovemaking one. This will suggest the temporality of love and at the same time beauty of death, as no one can deny the beauty in the unification of the lovers. The title of the poem means, here comes the day, so the dark idea of death and departure is in contrast with the light which is brought by day, and brings the fancy ideas about life-giving day under question. By doing so, Beckett shows that life and death are of the equal value in the supposed hierarchy. Even if one wants to take physical love as killing love, as Beckett sometimes does with an uncertainty, then the title will contradict it and give a positive meaning to it, as it does with the idea of dark death. If we take death as a love making, as the Renaissance word would indicate, then title of the poem will not be in contrast with the rest, as death has not any dark connotation. All of these ideas are correct and suggested at the same time and choosing one of them is a mere aporia, and that is the same with defining death, so by putting all these contrasting ideas together in this poem, Beckett wants to shed a new light on the subject and show its undecidability. The late French poem Mort de A.D. proves conclusively that his work is not entirely solipsistic and self-regarding. In this poem, he envisages the state of death in paradoxical terms more desperate even than those used to express physical pleasure:
thrust up against my old plank pock-marked with the black of blindly mixed up days and nights in being there in fleeing not and fleeing being there bent towards the confession of expiring time

This meaningful death-in-life is compared with the intolerable passivity of being able to do nothing but watch:
drinking down above the storm the unpardonable crime of time gripping old wood the witness of departures witness of returns

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The concluding line, almost an afterthought, does nothing to compel us to regard it as optimistic; what Beckett found pernicious in Proust is still symptomatic of the earthly condition here. The world, as he was later to show in Imagination Dead Imagine, is still proof against enduring tumult, still undeniably there, however threatened by the feelings of the mind (Pilling, 180). Love is associated with death in Becketts art. Love, which is the liveliest part of each life, is the closest to death as well. One of the best examples is the last poem of Quatre Pomes, I would like my love to die:
I would like my love to die and the rain to be falling on the graveyard and on me walking the streets mourning the first and last to love me

There is another version of this poem, the French one, which ends with: Mourning the one who thought she loves me. The variation in translation is to be discussed in the next chapter. Here this two oppositions of first and last to love me and one who thought she loves me will be put vis--vis, as the result of both of these two ideas about the beloved is the same thing, which is poets death wish for the beloved. Are these two synonyms? It seems even vice versa, so how can two opposite things lead to the same result? They are neither synonyms nor antonyms. This is an impossible situation. The other question coming to mind is that why one should make such a wish for his beloved? The answer varies with each of the two endings. First, the experience of having the other dead means the experience of making the self eternal, so in the wish made in the poem one can trace a kind of narcissism, sadism and self-centeredness. In Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return of the Dead, Davis declares, There may be in the subjects grief the traces of a sadistic triumph, because the loss of the object is also my victory over it; its death serves to confirm the fact that I am still alive (135). Therefore, there is a love and hate relationship between the subject and object. Love and hate are found supplementary and undecidable and the binary opposition of them is collapsed here. Second, the speaker wants to sacrifice his happiness for a melancholy to show his love, which is a masochistic act. He wants to pay the price of his happiness by mourning and melancholy. Mourning is the price of friendship, so the masochist responsible speaker wants to pay the price of his happiness by a big sorrow not to owe any thing. Beckett says, The tears of the world are a constant quality. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh." So he who once have laughed with the beloved, as he does not want some other one pay the equivalent of it by his 27

tears, wishes death for her beloved to be able to pay it himself. So melancholy is not the consequence of any event in the history of a friendship, rather it precedes all events, it is at the very least coextensive with friendship and perhaps even prior to it (Davis, 147); Third, by having his beloved dead, the speaker will always (as he is knows himself eternal) fix her in his mind at the best time, which is the prime of their lives. This is again narcissistic and besides sadistic. The girl is not unchangeable and eternal, so their love is in danger when she is alive, but by death she becomes eternal and fixed in the memory of her lover and in the land of death, as Allan Stoekl talks of in his introduction to Blanchots The Most High. There he finds the state of death as the state of paralysis and unchangeablity. Therefore, love can be unchangeable too in the state of death. The speaker does not want to experience new loves, and wants the love of his first beloved be the last, but if she survives, it becomes impossible as he may not love her after a while, or even she may stop loving him, so she should die to be eternally the love of the speaker. Besides, after the beloveds death the speaker brings her inside of himself and get to unification as Derrida claims in his lecture in the memory of Louis Althusser and in Gift of Death. There Derrida characterizes this avoidance of appropriation as an ethics of otherness, and he highlights the difficulty of maintaining such an ethics by examining the paradoxical implications of the phrase "Every other (one) is every (bit) other." This tautology (the rhetorical figure is made more effective in its original French, "Tout autre est tout autre") suggests that the friend who has died maintains a singularity and uniqueness that is not only wholly separate from the eulogist, but also wholly alien to the eulogist. So the unification is impossible but at least he can get closer to his own identity in relation with the internalized other. The speaker needs the eternal beloved as an eternal other, to be able to define himself, in his relation with her. Fourth, by mourning the other, one is always mourning himself as he is to die once. This is an early mourning for ones not being eternal. Besides, as the speaker is so mingled with the other, and he defines himself with her, loss of her is the loss of him by sequence, so wishing her death is like an idea of suicide for the speaker. In The Haunted Subjects the writer refers to Derridas Bliers. Le Dialogue ininterrompu: entre deux infinis, le pome and Politiques de lamiti :

Mourning is not only inherited in the friendship of self and other, it is equally inherited in the subjects self-relation. Its self-presence is fissured by its knowledge of its own death, so as it mourns the otherit also mourns itself.(144)

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Mourning is the experience of living the death. Although life and death are mingled in mans daily routine, death of the other and mourning her leads to a feeling of experiencing death as through melancholy one gets to a passivity and silence which is death itself to Beckett. Davis claims that according to Derrida Each time, the death of the other is a renewed death of the self, indeed it destroys the world, completely and uncompromisingly (Davis, 129). There again he declares [t]he subject begins to identify with the dead beloved. But the melancholia which is now expressed is not the subjects grief over the lost object; rather it is what the subject imagines the object to be feeling over the loss of its beloved (134). Fifth, according to Derrida, there is an unspeakable rule between two friends (and lovers) which says each one of the two sides of the relationship is always worried about seeing the death of the other, so it makes him less attentive to his presence. The thought of absence and loss shadows the presence, so the sooner the death comes, the better they can pay attention to each other. Derrida argues that friendship is always bound up with mourning because, from its very beginnings, we know that friends will be separated by death, that one will die before the other (Davis,144).The survivor is more attentive to the voices of his friends when they are dead than he was when they were living. This is what Derrida calls Terrifying Hypothesis, as quoted in Haunted Subjects (Davis, 149): as long as the girl is alive, the speaker cannot listen to her and be in a complete love with her, so she should die to be heard and loved more. In the first poem of the first French collection the speaker says, with each the absence of life is the same. With each of this same others the speaker is living the absence of life, the trace and shadow of life, rather than life itself. Life is not to be captured and defined completely. We can only get closer to a definition by the use of a negative proof and knowing what life is not. But the absence of life is not death, so there is not a binary opposition of Life/Death here, but rather there is Life/not-life. But this not-life exists too as we use the verb is for it. So not-life does not mean non-being as such a thing does not exist. Everything man has put in language is living and not- life and death are not exceptions. So by the use of absence of life the author has deconstructed the binary oppositions of life/death and life/not-life. Experiencing absence of love seems impossible but the speaker has done it and not even once, he has undertaken it several times with several lovers but it has always been the same. Therefore this experience is a possible impossible. In the third poem of the first French collection as before (in Echo's Bones), meditation on what precedes the moment of bliss affects the coherence of the poem, and it is only when he imagines 29

himself at the heart of the mystery that the poem focuses itself with precision. The continuous contact of love and death is characteristic ( Pilling, 173):
let her moisten as long as she likes till the elegy of shod horses' hooves still far from Les Halles or the riff-raff's water crumbles in the pipes or nothing more let her moisten perfect the excess and come with her idiot mouth with her hand formicating the hollow bulk the hollow eye listening to far-off tinkling scissor snips

Of the jettisoned poems Yoke of Liberty is clearly the best and one of Beckett's most successful poetic ventures. He used the paradoxical title (from Dante's De Monarchia, II, i) in his first published essay Dante . . . Bruno. Vico. Joyce to assist his articulation of a Necessity that is not Fate . . . a Liberty that is not Chance. The context here is altogether more intimate, and very delicately handled. There is a Chinese feel about the poem, with no sense of it degenerating into mere chinoiserie. Along with other poems of the period, it suggests he had more to learn from Pound than Eliot. The femme fatale may have a fin-de-sicle languorousness, but it cannot conceal her essentially predatory nature:
She preys wearily on sensitive wild things proud to be torn by the grave couch of her beauty.

This last line makes us retrospectively aware of the physical horror that is lurking behind her compelling features:
The lips of her desire are grey and parted like a silk loop threatening a slight wanton wound.

What strikes one as particularly impressive here is the lucidity of Becketts vision, a quality that is in short supply in the early poems. But it is a clearness of vision that is enhanced by the momentary occultation of metaphor, to distance the intimacy, and to render oblique the uncertainty the poet feels. Although the eye is kept firmly on the object, no attempt is made to penetrate an alien psychology. In looking out, the poet reveals his own inner condition: 30

But she will die and her snare tendered so patiently to my tamed watchful sorrow will break and hang in a pitiful crescent.

The cold purity of a crescent moon above a beloveds grave is made to coalesce with the image of a bird winged by a trap so that it can never fly again, and can only eke out its existence with memories of how well it was tendered. The bitterness coexists with the release of tension ( Pilling, 160-161). The first Enueg traces the peregrinations of the poet after he has left the hospital where his beloved is dying of tuberculosis. The escape into nature does not help. Here again love is associated with the idea of death and losing the beloved. Mourning has begun before death and the speaker cannot find comfort in any thing. By the way, this mourning has begun from the very first moment of the relationship, as one is to die before the other. In the poem Something there, the poet talks of the existence of something, which is not necessarily life. Therefore, death exists, and is not equal to non-existence.
so the odd time out there somewhere out there like as if something not life necessarily

Looking through the rest of the poem, this new something is nothing but lack of any particular image and a wasteland. When there is life, the whole globe is not yet bare, the image is horrifying and the source of the voice which says of something there is not clear. But in the last stanza silence and lack of anything which shutters the eyes of the character of the poem with its brightness and thread reigns and he faces death which is not horrible to him at all. He still exists as death itself has its own existence as something and not nothing. The difference is in getting rid of noise and image; then he will be in peace. Above it was shown the affinities between the ideas of Beckett and Derrida in the subject of death. To both of them, death is a daily experience, a state of silence and peace and at the same time passivity and paralysis. Therefore, there is always an ambivalent attitude towards death, a love and hate relationship. The dead other is treated as an eternal other and self, so they deconstruct the binary

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opposition of self and other, besides death and life one. None of the two thinkers under discussion gives a clear definition of life and death, since they know neither of them.

Identity
The danger is the neatness of identification. (Beckett, DanteBruno.VicoJoyce)

Beckett has always been doubtful about the concept of mans having a clearly definable self. He starts his literary career with Whoroscope, and Descartes, but this does not mean that he agrees with the idea duality of body and soul, self and other, and mans having a consistent self which can change the world with its wisdom. In After Beckett, Nojoumian claims, I believe Becketts point of departure from Cartesian logic is the way the self finally situates himself: in the middle of this dualityThrough this, he shatters or deconstructs this duality as well (390). The speaker in Becketts poems, as well as the speaker of his writings in other genres, cannot separate his inner self from the outside world. He finds his microcosm and the microcosm of others supplementary. The self cannot define itself separately; there are always other names and subjects that relate themselves to him(Nojoumian, The Unnamable 396). These others can be the speakers dead father, the voice of the mythological, literal and philosophical figures, or the beloved. But there is another other which is in him, his other self, whose voice can be heard more in Becketts late poems. Besides having the problem of inseparability from the outside other, he even has the problem of being in an opposition with himself and choosing one self out of twoif not moreothers and voices inside of him is an undecidable issue. First, to elaborate more on this subject, the outside other will be focused. The dead other and his voice which in inside and outside in relation to the speaker, and defines him have been discussed, speaking of Malacoda and the last poem of Quatre Poems, here the subject of the beloved as other, and the problematic being of love in terms of the identity of a person will be explained. Becketts first poem of French collection, elles viennent, has a strong love and identity theme is the first poem of, which is translated below:
they come others and same with each it is other and it is same

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with each the absence of love is the same with each the absence of life is the same.

Here the speaker is talking of women, beloveds, and the experience of the impossible and illusionary unification with the lover. They are others but at the same time, the speaker himself as every other has a rout in the subject. The others and same can be read in another way which is considering all the beloved the same although they look different. With each of these women, who are at the same time different from and same with each other and the speaker, the relationship is at the same time different and same. So the identity of the speaker and the beloveds are not easily defined, their identities are supplementary and on the threshold of being different and same. Here the author deconstructs the binary opposition of same / different. Aristotle believed that the soul was intermingled in the whole universe and this perfectly justifies his appearance in the mind of a poet who is seeking to experience the truth of that dictum at the same time as being continually thrust up against the barrier between self and world. In his early poems, Beckett is always in the outside world, wandering to learn the truth about himself, but it seems that after a while he understands that this is not a useful way. So he comes back to himself. This can be due to a new idea saying truth is in you, or just a depression of not being able to find the truth in the macrocosm, although still there are temptation of returning and being with the others and living with the illusion of being them and at the same time having a unique self. He is facing three aporias: aporia of being or not being with the others; aporia of being himself or the other; and at last, when alone, aporia of choosing one out of the many selves in him. So he always goes in and out of his solitude without gaining any thing concerning his identity but he cannot stop it as his identity has become a matter of diffrance to him. In one of his poems of the first French Collection, Lutce Square, the poet is first walking in a square with his beloved. But he suddenly leaves her and walks along all by himself in the square with his eyes on the outside world. Then s/he comes back to him: he either finds his other self coming to him, which is a shocking issue to himas man is always thinking of himself as oneor finds her beloved returning, but as he is in the illusion of being the other when he is in the outside world, she has become me.

I shiver, it is I rejoining me, it is with other eyes that I now see the sand, the puddles underneath the drizzle,

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a little girl dragging her hoop behind her, a couple, lovers who knows, hand in hand, the empty tiers, the lofty houses, and the sky that lights us up too late. I return to myself, I am surprised to find her sad face there.

Deciding whom the speaker is talking about is difficult. It is as difficult as the problem of identity for him. But the last lines shows that he has chosen one of the selves in him as myself, and is no longer in the illusion of being the girl and seeing the world through her eyes, as she is standing face to face to him and is out of him, although one cannot say it is a certain constant choice. Something there has the same undecidability in identity motif as well. In the first stanza, there is a dialogue between two voices, one is the voice of the speaker, the other is the voice of his other, who can simply be one of his different selves. The surprising thing is that the focalizer who has been the speaker up to the end of the first stanza changes to third person, who can be his other self. The change between the selves in the character shatters his consistency. The voice is gone but it does not say that the speaker is freed from his multiple selves. The idea of having different contracting selves that lead to ones not being able to call himself one, is elaborated here artistically. Reader can understand that what Beckett says completely differs from what others call a simple change in the mood of one. The problem is being no one, having no central self. Of course, there is a possibility of having another voice, character, and focalizer/speaker too; one can separates the focalizer from the speaker and voice, and consider it a third person and an outside other, but this does not still clarify the source of the other voice and the identity of the character.

Something there Where Out there Out where Outside What The head what else Something there somewhere outside At the faint sound so brief It is gone and the whole globe Not yet bare The eye

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Opens wide Wide Till in the end Nothing more Shutters it again

Derrida has the same habit of having another voice in his works contradicting him, this is in its prime in Spurs where the other voice even mocks the logic of the person who is supposed to be the main speaker, he puts him in the margin from time to time, so the center is always changing. The reader cannot say who had the dominant voice or idea in the work. Beckett and Derrida both deconstruct the centrality in identity. One of the last poems by Beckett is Neither which talks of the undecidability of identity. Neither the inner nor the outer life; neither him, nor the other, and none of his selves can be chosen. The speaker is just going to and fro in shadow and wanders between the multiplying options concerning his being, that very essential and seemingly easy question. The title itself shows the idea of this uncertainty, that he is none of the selves he finds in or out of him. And his self is at the same time all of them. So he is following the Derridean logic of both A and not-A or neither A nor not-A versus that of either Aor not-A. There is no clear A and not-A, they are supplementary, and even there is no neither A nor not-A, as a part of each of these two contrasting items is in a way accurate for the speaker, so there is always a play of negating and admitting when one is to choose. Here neither means both too, which is a deconstruction of these two terms.

to and fro in shadow from inner to outer shadow from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither

This idea can be supported when we find that the speaker uses the same adjective for both self and unself, he cannot ignore none of them and pass, they are supplementary, he is stuck. Although neither of them can satisfy him, but he cannot stop being present as one, so he needs both impossible options. In the ending lines of the poem it seems that he wants to absent himself from self and other, this will lead to silence and death, which is the land of womb and before it too. This is the second phase of Beckettian ideology, according to Alain Robbe-Grillet, which is elaborated in Endgame. Of course, this is an impossible act to get rid of the presence, as man is present even when dead. He only wants to stop living with the others and go back to his solitude. His solitude has always been full of his other selves, so what he wants to do is to reduce the cultural noises and the struggles of finding the identity 35

between many selves, and get closer to the land of death and silence. Silence does not seem horrible to him, as it sometimes was/is, and would/will make him speak not to die. The two tenses are used, as this research does not aim to suggest that the speaker/poet is now out of the ambivalence of loving/detesting death and silence. He is just closer to the silence willing side now, which cannot be so persistent.
absent for good from self and other then no sound then gently light unfading on that unheeded neither unspeakable home

At the time being he is enjoying the silent womb like home within himself, where he cannot talk of, as it is indescribable and describing it will destroy it, as it will break silence, which is one of the essential stones of its structure. But the light is always on the problem of neither: the problem of choosing the identity. This will, sooner or later, shatter the silence. The problem of identity is irresolvable. Here the impossibility of identity in the eyes of Beckett and Derrida was discussed. Man always defines himself in relation with the other; no matter s/he is out of him in the macrocosm, or in him, as his other self, in the microcosm. The identity of man is always on the threshold of self and other. He can never give in to being the other completely as it is impossible and against his selfhood. But at the same time he cannot have an independent self as his self is built upon the other. Subject is constituted by its exposure to others; there is no self-standing, according to Derrida. So as self is a constitute of the other he cannot tell himself from him, besides being a separate individual by definition. Thus he can never find out who he is and his identity.

Love
Love is another key concept and motif in Becketts poetry. I have already discussed love/death and the idea of beloved as the other who is identical with and different from the speaker at the same time. Here, proofs from the poems about the illusive nature of true love, with which Derrida agrees, will be brought that would admit the affinity of the idea of these two thinkers about the concept of love. The true love is a sublime issue, and according to Derrida and Beckett there is nothing sublime and complete in itself. Derrida deconstructs the Kantian idea of sublime entities, using German 36

philosophers own terms, parargon (a kind of decoration for the work of art) and ergon or the work of art, which is known as sublime and complete, and finds them supplementary; if ergon was perfect, then there would be no parargon. The existence of Parargon brings the completeness and sublimity of ergon under question. He finds the binary opposition of ergon/ parargon vicious and problematic (Shaw, 119). Beckett by bringing examples in his art supports this idea. True love as a sublime entity is in need of physical love, as it helps the lover to get closer to unification, which is an inseparable part of true love. So true love is not complete and cannot be sublime. On the other hand, physical love should have a spiritual part to be love; otherwise, it is only the manifestation of a blind passion. Here besides deconstructing the binary opposition of True Love/Physical Love by declaring the two seemingly contrasting terms in need of each other, Beckett speaks of the destructiveness of each part for the other while requiring it. Each of the opposite sides can only exist and be defined when the other side exists, but harms it with its own existence. This play of preserving/ destroying last forever and none of the two contracting forces can demolish the other, they are always standing armed at the front and threshold. This leads to ambivalence in the speaker of the works of Beckett, he cannot take one side of the opposition. One of the best love poems by Beckett is the poem Cascando. In this poem the speaker is terrified of loving someone else, of breaking a promise. He wants his love to last but he knows that it is impossible and is scared of it then. He seems to get to the understanding of the temporality and uncatchable being of love in the second stanza. He first says, if I do not love you I shall not love but after lines he contradicts himself saying: terrified again of loving and not you. So it seems possible for him to love someone else while it is impossible as said before. Beckett has not changed his mind. He has not found second love possible for him but it seems that it is inevitable although undesirable. This reminds us of the very famous quotation of Beckett: I cant go on, I will go on. One can think that the first notion is true: a true lover can never fall in love with someone else even after separation, as he is living with the memory of the beloved. Then there is no reason for being scared as second love will not come, and whenever it comes, then the person has forgotten the first love completely and does not think of it. A second love when someone is thinking of the first is not love then. But Beckett does not believe in these clear-cut rules. He knows that it is a romantic, idealistic, and wrongly certain idea about love: no matter how much he resists and lives in the fairy land of one eternal love, a second love and a betray to the first love will happen. This second love is not less than the first one, but the

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memories of the first love co-exist with it. The reason why this can happen is that love is all a pretension, and the speaker is terrified of pretending to be in love all this long. In the other section, the poet hesitates again in the pretentious nature of love. He thinks of some people who can really love his beloved, and this is a relief to him as he finds a truth in life, although he is not the one who loves, as if he is incapable of it. However, he does not find a synthesis for the true love/ pretentious love, and is in the state of undecidability, as in the word unless there is a hesitation and uncertainty. Another interesting thing about this poem is that the word love is used for the both kinds of love without adjective, as if we are using one signifier for two signifieds. Love is a word referring to a broad range of concepts and there is no closure for the trace of all the things love is and is not, which define it by their absence. In the fourth poem of the Quatre Poemes the poet wants his beloved dead. As said before, there are two endings, which lead to different poems: the English one describes the beloved as first and last to love me and the French one as one who thought she loves me. To learn more about the concept of love in the eyes of Beckett, focusing on the two endings is needed. To do so one should consider two sides of the binary opposition of true love (English Version) /pretentious love (French Version) synonyms, and deconstruct the opposition. Then the true love is as false as a pretentious one. The truth does not exist, or at least is not to be captured; it is always to come and undergoes the matter of Derridean diffrance. Now that love is not true, the poet wants to take revenge from the one who just pretends to love him. But if he is truly in love with her, he cannot live without her and wants her always alive and happy, even if she does not love him. Therefore, the true being of his love for her and by sequence the true being of love in general, is under question here again. The death wish can be a revenge taken from the beloved, and even himself, for falling in such an artificial love. On the other hand, if we try to consider the true love an antonym for the pretentious love, and try to pretend betraying the findings about the nature of love in the previous paragraph, and believe in the possibility of existence of true love for granted, we get to some other reading of love and death. How can one have his true love dead, when he is alive? He needs her dead to feel living and defined in relation to an already dead and eternal other. Even with the precondition of having true love in the world, and reading the French and English versions of this poem as two separate poems with opposing 38

ideas of the lover, we get to the similar ideas about true loves being a non-existing concept. May be Beckett puts the two different endings for this poem to show us no matter how much man tries to separate true love from the pretentious love, he will not succeed as they overlap; In the first poem of the first French collection, elles viennent, the poet writes, with each the absence of love is the same. It is interesting that the speaker does not say; with each love is the same. He is talking about the trace and absence of love, which defines love. Therefore, love is not present in any love relationship, and is always something to come and undergoes the matter of diffrance. Another idea about love in Backettian and Derridean viewpoint is its encounter with ethics, and the problem of physical love/spiritual love. As Patricia Coughlan in The Poetry is Another Pair of Sleeves claims:
one might point out that the lyric speakers in the poems are anxious to an exactly equal extent about the failure of attachmentthe loss of loveand the failure of detachment: erotic desire and longing are matched by moments of recoil and fear of destructive immersion in the other.(73)

In the third poem of the first French collection, the poet writes to be there jawless toothless/where the pleasure of loss is lost/together with the scarcely inferior /one of gain. There is an enjoyable fear of loosing love by making it physical in the speaker. Loss of the physical presence of the beloved, is better that loss of love, which comes after the inferior pleasure of physical attachment. Lovemaking is killing love by means of love and with the illusive aim to capture love. It is the end of the illusion of sameness with the lover, with its getting close to unification but not reaching to it, as there is always a distance between the loverstheir skin at least. Sex brings the fancy concept of love down to earth. One good example of this subject in his poetry is in Alba, where according to Coughlan The characteristic Beckettian aporia occurs:the desired womans beauty produces a blank sheet and bulk dead, instead of the conventional sun and unveiling; the tempest of emblems is quite obscured (75).
who though you stoop with fingers of compassion to endorse the dust shall not add to your bounty whose beauty shall be a sheet before me a statement of itself drawn across the tempest of emblems so that there is no sun and no unveiling and no host only I and then the sheet

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and bulk dead

The physical beauty of the beloved is like a veil before the eyes of the speaker, it disturbs his view of true love. But at the same time it is beauty of the woman which makes the man love her, so true love is based on physical appearance and is inseparable from it. Therefore, no fixed idea about morality or immorality, and physicality or meta-physicality of love exists. Even the speaker cannot claim any thesis about the sublime being of beauty. It is this discovery [of the absence of reliable system, whether metaphysical, moral, or aesthetic] which is rehersed in Alba (Coughlan, 75). This is exactly the undecidability and aporia of man in the world according to Derrida; there is no certain answer for any question in life. The second poem of the first French collection is another example of physical love encountering true love without being prior or even inferior to it. The calm act of sex ( elle l'acte calme), untroubled by considerations of its spiritual value, seems the necessary precondition to genuine love: labsence / au service de la presence. The quelques haillons d'azur dans la tte (few fragments of blue in the head) signal the first appearance of a metaphor for his idea about heavenly and true love. The absence of spirituality in lovemaking is in the service of the spiritual love, it is a trace of it. The late grace of rain is the spiritual gift of love, which has fallen on the speaker once, although it has been too late for him, but now it is ceasing to fall, now that he is making love and is united with the lover. The act of ejaculation and satisfaction of the speaker is compared to the womans emptying him of love. The end of lovemaking is losing love, which is contradictory as love should have been made and strengthen. The undecidability of the speaker is clear with his being passive but the woman is active in lovemaking and can empty him pure of love.
with her the calm act the clever pores the affable sex the waiting not so slow the regrets not so long absence in the service of the presence few fragments of blue in the head the spots finally dead of heart all the late grace of a rain ceasing to fall on an August night with her empty him pure of love

In Beckett and Eros, the Davies claims the female sex is given two contrasting forms, love active and love passive; and the male sex is likewise given two forms of hatred, one of fleeing and 40

disinvolvement,and one of pursuit and oppression( 93). Here the woman has the love active form, and the hatred of man is one of pursuit and oppression. He does not run away, as he is in love and cannot decide whether sex will improve or destroy their love, this undecidability leads him to a paralysis, which can be a defensive system in him, as through this passivity, he denies all the responsibilities and promises. But this is an unconscious act, one cannot say that the speaker is irresponsible, he just cannot decide, and this is decision which brings responsibility, so it is natural that he can be free of any responsibility now that he cannot choose. In the fourth poem of Quatre Poemes the anti-erotic stance is characteristic, but little is added to the kind of complex responses to love already examined except, perhaps, a quietist pathos that is not Beckett's forte. Here the writer wants his beloved die to loose her physical forces. Then they cannot make love and their love will be eternal. Here the beloved takes a love passive form and the speakers hatred is one of fleeing and disinvolvement. By having her beloved dead he can escape all the circumstances of a physical love. Paul Davies writes the role of the female changes, according to this pattern from the ambivalent erotic attraction of the woman-figure, to become the mother figure who must either be fled fromor destroyed( 93). This uncertainty of female sex about her identity is due to the speakers disability in taking one notion about love and self, prior to the others. He wants to have a heavenly relation with the beloved, free from eroticism, and this leads to changes in the beloveds identity; she becomes mother or sister to get rid of sexuality, but even this is not satisfactory for the speaker. The love of mother or sister is not what he wants. To experience the heavenly love of the beloved, the speaker should give the identity of a beloved to her but empty her from eroticism, which is impossible, so the only way is her death and losing physicality. The mother- beloved should die so that the speaker can be in love with her, just to be in love with her. He prefers to love the dead and non-beings. Here death has a double function: it puts the mother under erasure forever, and preserves the beloved eternally as well. Another example of this change in the identity of the beloved in the eyes of the speaker is in From the Only Poet to a Shining Whore.
Oh radiant, oh angry, oh Beatrice, she foul with the victory of the bloodless fingers and proud, and you, Beatrice, mother, sister, daughter, beloved, fierce pale flame of doubt, and Gods sorrow,

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and my sorrow.

The disgust at erotic satisfaction (she foul with the victory / of the bloodless fingers) parallels the satisfactions of the spirit. These are shown to be equivocal not only for Beatrice and Dante (and Beckett as Dante), but also for God, whose sorrow doubtlessly derives from his inability to possess the beauty of Beatrice more carnally than even his penetration can guarantee. God is the pure soul, the silent. But even he is in search of presence and bodily pleasures. Therefore, the aporia the speaker encounters in choosing body and soul, and living on the threshold of them, is understandable. This is not only applicable to his attitude towards love, but also to his view of death, silence, absence and presence. In this part, the concept of divine love/physical love was discussed. In the previous sections of identity and death, the relation of speaker and the beloved (dead or alive) as the other to him, and the problem of identifying the self and completion through love was elaborated. Here the deconstruction of the binary opposition of body and soul, spirituality and physicality by love in the poems of Beckett and the works of Derrida was shown. The divine love is in need of bodily love as it is the embodiment of the spiritual unification of the two lovers. But at the same time this is the physicality of love which destroys it. These two seemingly opposite sides of love are supplementary and destructive for each other. This makes Becketts love poems self-deconstructive.

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Chapter Three: Self-deconstructiveness of Language

Becketts first and last writing is poetry. He started his career with Whoroscope and ended it with What is the word. He always knew himself, and desired to be known, as a poet (according to Harvey) although he was famous for his plays, short fictions, and novels. What is so significant in this genre and this specific form of language usage? What is poetry? This question is the title of one of the essays of Jacques Derrida, che cos la poesia? in which he has answered the question:
1. The economy of memory: a poem must be brief, elliptical by vocation, whatever may be its objective or apparent expanse 2. The heart: a story of heart poetically enveloped in the idiom apprendre par coeur, whether in my language or another, the English language (to learn by heart). (229)

Knowing Becketts interest in reduced language and getting rid of mind and knowledge, one can simply find the idea of Derrida of poetry so close to that of Beckett. Derrida finds poetry beyond language and always trying to defend itself against it, like a rolled up hedgehog, but paradoxically it is more vulnerable to language. So the process of writing poetry seems impossible:
It[poem] is first of all thrown out on the roads and in the fields, thing beyond languages, even if it sometimes happens that it recalls itself in language, when it gathers itself up, rolled up in a ball on itself[as a hedgehog], it is more threatened than even in its retreat: it thinks it is defending itself, and it loses itself. (Che Cose 231)

Beckett has always been aware and even fond of the impossible actions, and always wanted to write beyond language. Of course he, and Derrida, knew that impossible is not impossible, as if it really was it would not have a name. If we are going to speak of it [impossible], we will have to name something. Not to present the thing, here the impossible, but to try with its name, or with some name, to give an understanding of or to think this impossible thing, this impossible itself (Given Time 10). So Beckett writes poetry to overcome language as he finds it close to possible, if not completely feasible. 43

The other thing about poem, as said is its being understandable only by heart and not by mind. So the reader should approach more and more to the realm of ignorance, the territory of death and peace which everyone, consciously or unconsciously, are trying to get to. Of course, this ignorance is not a genuine one, and as Beckett claims it is a learned ignorance; man after learning the hollowness of Knowledge and meaninglessness of life, decides to give up learning anything but ignorance and living his life by heart, as he was supposed to before eating from the Tree of Knowledge.
I call a poem that very thing that teaches the heart, invents the heart, that which, finally, the word heart seems to mean and which, in my language, I cannot easily discern from the word itselfIn order to respond in two words [the question of what poetry is]: ellipsis, for example, or election, heart, hrisson, or istrice[hedgehog], you will have had to disable memory, disarm culture, know how to forget knowledge, set fire to the library of poetics. The unicity of the poem depends on this conditionit[poetry] lets itself be done, without activity, without work, in the most sober pathos, a stranger to all production, especially to creation. (Derrida, Che Cose 231-233)

This giving in to ignorance and death, and the reduced elliptic language which is so close to silence, is what Beckett has always longed to get to in his works and to him they are quite synonyms: silence is the death of man which is at the same time desired, when one sees it as peaceful kind of life, and horrible, when he finds death as nothingness. To be able to express all these in the best way possible he chooses poetry which is an excellent medium for it. I am going to bring some examples of his poems in this chapter, and support the ideas given which both Beckett and Derrida believed in. In another section of this chapter the closeness of the ideas of these two thinkers about translation will be discussed and some proofs from Becketts translation of poetry will be brought.

Poetics of Failure
Becketts art is about the undecidability of man in the massive world, as there is not a single issue which man is certain of. To express this, the form and language of his works is confusing. He himself in an interview claims to find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now. On the other hand he believes that behind all the dilemmas and aporias of life, there is nothing particular in the world. All we have is a game to be able to ignore the burden of nothingness. Seeing this, all the serious issues in life and literature are ridiculous to him. Even language is nothing to him as it is a completely arbitrary system to express the nothingness of life. But this does not mean that one can and should stop any activities; he needs to express himself to live, no matter how impossible expressing this nothingness of life is. If he quit it he will be dead and may be a non-being. He may lose 44

even this nothing. Although getting rid of life sometimes is a desire for the writer, but besides it there is always a fear of entering to a state one does not know anything of. In Three Dialogues Beckett finds art as The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express (17). The role of the artist is here of significance, as he is the one to express and the one who knows it is impossible. He fails constantly in expressing the nothingness as his materialwords and language in the case of Beckettis unable to reflect any meaning, if be. But he should keep on being. To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living (Beckett, Duthuit, Three Dialogues 21). This idea is expressed in his poems too. In Casket of Pralinen for a Daughter of a Dissipated Mandarin he writes:
Oh I am ashamed of all clumsy artistry I am ashamed of presuming to arrange words of everything but the ingenious fibers that suffer honestly.

The failure in the expressing due to the shortages of language and the thing to be expressed is clearly shown in the poetry of Beckett. Here the four prominent aspects of his language usage and its affinity with the idea he is expressing in his poems will be discussed: repetition, shattered syntax, silence and music.

Reductive Variations to Say the Same Thing

The absoluteness of original experience lies in its repetition, this repetition is the selfdeconstruction which Attridge named as the signature of the work of Beckett. (Lane 67)

Repetition is a main element in the poetry of Beckett. In his early poems he repeats (quotes) the other thinkers and writers, but in his late poems he repeats (quotes) himself more and more. According to him there is nothing new and unsaid in the world, although each work of art is unique. He talks of this contradictory essence of art as the new thing which has happened (Disjecta 70). Derrida has the same style of writing in his works. About 2/3 of Cinders is the repetition of some parts of Envoi He claims
The citations co-appear along with it [the text], they are summoned: an incomplete archive, still burning or already consumed, recalling certain textual sites, the continuous, tormenting, obsessive meditation about what are and are not, what is meantor silenced by, cinders. (26)

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Beckett burns down his language and speech to its cinder, and then repeats it. His language is that of trace, it reminds of a repeated idea, without completely quoting it. This reducing language to its most reduced form is the best way to get rid of it, represent the lifes repetitiveness and its essence as nothing especial, as life is what the language expresses. There is a good affinity between the form and the content of Becketts art. But no repetition is completely the same thing said before, as both Beckett and Derrida believe. Nothing happens twice exactly, time and context change, therefore the reading of an event is different each time it happens. By repeating with slight variation, Beckett wants to assert this idea as well. To bring some example from the poems, the very first one will be focused first: Whoroscope. This poem is impossible to read without the help of the Eliotian notes, and may be Harveys 60 pages of explanation. It is full of quotations and historical events. This puts it between literature and biography or history. But what is the use of it? By getting rid of poetic language the poet gets closer to the reality of life and breaks the sublimity of the great French philosopher, Descartes, about whom the poem is. By repeating the historical texts in this way he makes it so common and recurrent, he desecrates history by repeating it so. The poet uses same words but in contrasting meanings. This is related to the idea of impossibility of a mere repetition and according to Derrida Affirmation of negativity, when he discusses the subject of repetition in How to Avoid Speaking: Denials.
Were moving he said were off-Porca Madonna! the way a boatswain would be, or a sack-ofpotatoey charging Pretender. Thats not moving, thats moving.

Here Beckett is explaining the idea of relative movement, discovered by Galileo: one standing in a boat is not moving seemingly but as the boat moves, he is moving. This idea of being static and dynamic at the same is well shown Becketts line. Another example of the revealing repetition is in the first poem of the first French collection, elles viennent. This work is a good instance of Derridean iterability:
others and same with each it is other and it is same with each the absence of love is the same with each the absence of life is the same.

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The experience of being in love seems to be the same no matter who the beloved is, but at the same time it is different from lover to lover as they are not the same. Love should be repeatable but at the same time it is unrepeatable, as the context of each love is different. This iterability in the experience is transformed to the experience of language too: the incomplete repetition of the last two sentences shows the necessity and impossibility of repetition allegorically. Another side of the repetition in language is the music it makes. The importance of music in the eyes of Beckett in its own section below will be discussed, but here it can be claimed that as Beckett knew music as the best form of utterance and built upon silences, he wanted to bring in into his art which was always under erasure and in search of silence. May be one of the other reasons he preferred poetry over other genres is its being musical, even in its most minimalist form. He does not simply use rhythm and rhyme to have music, as it is the most artificial language usage, and Beckett always wanted to get rid of the arbitrary chains of it. Music is a communication system, which has nothing to do with knowledge and translation. It is universal and understandable for all. The technique Beckett uses to bring music into his poems is reducing language to fundamental sounds and repeats them like musical notes. Of course they have a significance other than their sound, which is the meaning they represent. But this is so close to the music produced by them. Elizabeth Drew, in her essay, HEAD TO FOOTSTEPS: Fundamental sounds in dread nay and Roundelay explains that the repetitiveness of the words resemble the footsteps of the speaker, wandering in the world. This is understandable for anyone who knows or does not know English, who can or cannot read a poem. Even in other poems in which the speaker is in his own microcosm, the repetitive sounds remind us of the repetitiveness of life and time. Repetition is more prominent in the late poems. I have discussed the repetition in Thither and its role in transmitting the implications of the poet in the previous chapter. The last poem by Beckett, What is the word is based on repetition. This expresses the repetitive nature of language and words: we have a few words language is made of, by repeating them in different syntax and context to communicate. There is nothing new in word. The poem is made of 22 words repeated several times to get to 228 words.
what is the word seeing all this all this this all this this here folly for to see what glimpse seem to glimpse -

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need to seem to glimpse afaint afar away over there what folly for to need to seem to glimpse afaint afar away over there what what what is the word

Therefore, repetition is a significant element in the poetry of Beckett. It represents the repetition in time and life. Repetition is never completely possible as the context changes each time, so each word/experience is always happening as if it is its first time of occurrence. This is against the definition of repetition. Beckett has used repetition against itself: one cannot simply ignore the new significances of a repeated word in his works, and on the other hand one cannot deny the reduction of the effect in repetition. He produces ambivalence and aporia for the reader by the use of repetition.

Shattered Syntax
Beckett does not use the classic syntax and logic of language. The usage of punctuation is so rare and leads to undecidability in reading, as a sentence without any comma or period has no closure. Derrida is interested in this subject too and many of his works have started by his different readings a sentence suggests.
The sentence says what it will have been, from the moment it gives itself up to itself, giving itself as its own proper name, the consumed (and consummate) art of the secret: of knowing how to keep itself from showing. (Cinders 35)

This is what Beckett thinks of life in general; there can be many reading of any routine act in life, any defined term. There is a secret behind everything which it is always fighting not to reveal. By changing the syntax to nothing ordered, he shifts the limits of language, of course without passing them as it is impossible. According to Lane in Beckett and Philosophy he approaches the edge of language. But no matter how reduced his language in terms of syntax and diction is, it is still language. His new syntax is rhetoric, but a rhetoric confronting rhetoric, it is always in denial of its being, and it is constantly under erasure. Even the most minimalistic poetic language cannot get rid of rhetoric as it always refers to something beyond what it says. However, Becketts rhetoric is against all rhetoric ever was. It is conscious of its own being rhetorical so it is against itself. Beckett has used classical rhetoric like metaphor, synecdoche, and allusion in his early poetry although in his own way, which was so far away from the way others used it. His use of rhetoric does not lead to beautiful, completely 48

understandable poems, but rather to complication and mess. It is as if his usage of rhetoric is a kind of ridiculing rhetoric and defeating it. In his late poetry he quit complicated language and tried to write in simple language and use as few figures of speech as possible. Beckett knows that the parargon of rhetoric is inseparable from the ergon of the language of a literary work, they are supplementary. But he tries to reduce it to the least possible, to the cinders. Shattered syntax is more prominent in the late poems, but in the earlier poems there exists this kind of syntax too. It is as if the poet by breaking the pose of the classic grammar and syntax tries to experience all the possibilities of language and reading. Beckett uses this and when there are

boundaries he simply breaks them, so he takes language to the state of a relative freedom. He gets best language can give to refer to more meaning and taking advantage of this against language itself. In the poem Cascando we have last times of loving/of knowing not knowing pretending. There can be more than one reading and therefore one interpretation of these sentences, and they can even contradict, so the reader is to be able to digest all the impossibilities of having contradictory ideas at the same time, and in one sentence. The first reading can be last times of loving/of knowing not knowing/ pretending. In this reading the man is accused of having the knowledge of his knowing nothing, and this is the whole knowledge of him, the rest is pretence. This motif of lack of knowledge is repeated by Beckett in the first poem of the Second French collection when he writes and we know none we know nothing at all, so for a reader this is a familiar idea. The other reading is last times of loving/of knowing not knowing pretending. Here the speaker claims that man knows that he does not know that he pretends and knows nothing. Therefore, the speaker is conscious of his unconscious act of pretending. This is a big paradox and completely impossible, but the poet never deprives the reader on the threshold of the impossible as it makes the impossible close to possible. Pretence is always intentional be definition, but here it is treated as a conscious act, which is in itself deconstruction of the concepts of pretence and knowledge, conscious and unconscious, intentional and unintentional. Another reading is of knowing/ not knowing/ pretending. In this case the speaker is negating himself; first he wants to talk of the knowledge he has (here about love), but then he understands that he does not know any thing and is only pretending. This sentence is repeated in the poem but with a slight difference: of knowing not knowing pretending/pretending. The second pretending is added which can be read as a new line, increasing the weight of the concept of pretence in relation to knowledge, and its previous line can have its two mentioned readings. But if we consider it as an instance of runon-line, then there can be new readings: [O]f knowing not knowing pretending pretending, meaning 49

the speaker knows that he does not know that he pretends that he is pretending. The act of pretension is doubled, it is like an actor playing the role one who is pretending to know something, but the actor knows that he does not know he is doing so, this means he is drawn in his role in a way that he cannot tell pretension from knowledge, and that is the only thing he knows. This is what human condition is. There can be more readings but the few discussed here shows Becketts use of shattered syntax to imply more meanings which means to lack of closure. On the other hand by using this new syntax which is defeating itself as syntax, Beckett brings opposing ideas into a challenge, he deconstructs many definitions by putting them beside their opposite in an shattered syntax, where no dash or comma acts as the frontier between them, there is no threshold. Therefore their being supplementary and undecidability of defining them clearly can be perfectly shown. The poet implies the arbitrariness of language and lifes becoming a linguistic game. In What is the word, this shattered syntax gets to its pick. Words are constantly repeating and the only cohesion and drive of the poem is the number of words which increases: the reader is waiting for a word to come, which can give a meaning to the poem and be an answer to the question the title poses. But the only thing he gains at last is uncertainty caused by the multiple meaning words imply in the free arrangement and syntax the poet uses. For instance folly for to need to seem to glimpse afaint afar away over there what can be read as folly for/to need to seem to glimpse afaint /afar /away /over there /what or folly for/ to need/ to seem/ to glimpse/ afaint/ afar/ away/ over there /what . There can be no closure for this poem, and consequently the definition of language and the art of Beckett. He is uncertain about the subject so how can he provide the reader with a clear answer for his questions. He can just put him in the labyrinth of his own messed up thought by using a language accurate for it. Derrida talks about this issue in The Ear of the Other
Perhaps all of the poetic works he [the author] does in order to mark his patronym in his text, either in pieces or in an integral fashion, is a means not only of misleading the reader or the detectivesthe critical detectivesbut also of losing himself. Perhaps he doesnt know his proper name. (106)

In Dread Nay there is no classical syntax use and logical and linguistic relationship between the lines. This leads to readers relating them with any logic s/he finds appropriate, this is the reader who is making the text, although Beckett has written a text upon which the reader is producing new ones. According to Derrida in Post Card

50

the author already is no longer there, no longer responsible. He has absented himself in advance, leaving the document in your hands. At least this is what he states. He does not seek to convince you of a truth. He does not seek to detract any thing from the power, the proprietary investments, that is, the associations and projections of anyone. Association is free, which holds also for the contract between the writing and the reading of this text, along with the exchange, engagements, and gifts, along with everything whose performance is attempted. At least this is what he says. The speculation discourse would have the value of what is performed in analysis, or in the field called literary: you make of it what you like or what you can, it no longer concerns me, it has no law, especially scientific law. It concerns you.you can no longer get rid of the uncontestable inheritanceuntil the end of time you will formulate the theory carrying his name. (344)

This idea of deconstructive Derrida is traceable in the poems of Beckett especially in the poem under discussion. The following extract shows lack of a clear association between the lines, which leads to readers associating them in uncountable ways.
Head sphere Ashen smooth One eye No hint when to Then glare Cyclop no One side Eerily

Of course the reader may figure out the poet is speaking of an apocalyptic gray land with someone reduced to an eye looking outside. But the reader can read/reproduce the text in many other ways: it may describe the inner state of man, to a threshold land between outside and inside world. And else, he can read the sentences using any grammatical and logical order he wishes, as the poet puts it to him. The special kind of syntax Beckett uses, which close to nothing, leads to his getting rid of any promise of suggesting any certain meaning. This obligation goes to the reader who searches for meaning. The infinite number of significances the text with shattered syntax can produce makes closure impossible. This freedom and openness of text is what Beckett and Derrida are interested and believe in. On the other hand this shattered syntax reduces the arbitrary language to its elements and its main aim: communicate meaning. But it has a negative effect as well, which is intentional: the poet shows that the communication the language makes is a mere misunderstanding. Shattered syntax is a specific use of language standing against language. It is a rhetoric although looks free from any rhetoric and in struggle with it. The text with this kind of syntax is rhetorical but defeats rhetorical texts. This is what Paul de Man knows as the definition of a self-deconstructive text.

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Silence
In How to Avoid Speaking: Denials, Derrida speaks of the necessity and impossibility of silence. First he says
To avoid speaking, to delay the moment when one will have to say something and perhaps acknowledge, surrender, impart a secret, one amplifies the digressions. I will here attempt a brief digression on the secret itself. Under this title, how to avoid speaking, either because one has promised not to speak and to keep a secret, or because one has an interest, sometimes vital, in keeping silence even if put to the rack. This situation again presupposes the possibility of speaking. (86)

Then he finds silence out of reach of man and a form of language and speech. Therefore he deconstructs the concept of silence as believed: a state beyond language.
Even if I decide to be silent, even if I decide to promise nothing, not to commit myself to saying something that would confirm once again the destination of speech, and the destination toward speech, this silence yet remains a modality of speech: a memory of promise and a promise of memory. (Derrida, How to Avoid 84)

Beckett has the same attitude toward silence too. He knows it as a relief from the wounded language has caused in the soul of man. But at the same time he is aware of the impossibility of getting rid of language. As Nojoumian claims about Unnamable, The narrator speaks in and endless manner waiting to be put into silence by words (The unnamable 393). The speakers of the works of Beckett are always in search of silence but are speaking constantly, it is as if they want to demolish language through language. Paul Stewart, believes unnamabality cannot be approached through language, and yet that is all we have (244). As Heidegger says we are like fish in the sea of language, we cannot imagine any where else and cannot live any where elseif be. Silence or death is inscribed within language and at the same time it is the outcast of language, it is the negative and positive of language(Nojoumian, The Unnamable 401). On the other hand, they are scared of silence as it is associated with death in their minds. So they have a love and hate relationship with silence as they have with death; they are both desired as they are peaceful, and undesired as are unknown and may be a non-being state. selfs obligation to speak in order to be as if to have a short pause in betweeneven for thinking in advance about what to saymight end in non-being (Nojoumian, The Unnamable 394). Beckett finds Silence as the death of language and the death of the self (Nojoumian, The Unnamable 397). But as I said this does not mean that the speaker of the works detests silence. 52

Silence and death eventually become a blessed place to be. It is not surprising, then, to see that critics take silence as the God of Becketts negative theologysilence is not the place of non-knowledge but the place of one does not have knowledge of. (Nojoumian, The Unnamable 399)

Language and self are always under erasure in Becketts art. I have already brought examples of Becketts notion of silence/death and silence/ self from his poems in the previous chapter under Death and Identity sections. Here a few more examples from his poems concerning this subject, with an eye on silence specifically, will be brought. In the sixth poem of the first French collection the poet is speaking of a silence within and without.
Music of indifference heart time air fire sand of silence atrophy of loves cover their voice so that I may hear no more me silent

The music of indifference is killing to himalthough from time to time this indifference becomes precious to the poet. To defend himself from indifference he needs silence or language. He has suggested the two ways by using the complicated phrase sand of silence. Sand is the trace of the sea; the poet has named the essential elements of nature as they are what remains from love, they are the bones of Echo; air for wind, fire, and sand for water, which is not there, and at the same time for soil as it is a kind of soil any how. Silence is the trace of the absent sea of language. So first he wants to face music with silence and then with its trace, language.
1. He asks for silence to stand against the music of indifference, he wants silence to reign, and not only his own silence (both in the internal and external worlds) but the silence of the world without. When there is voice, the opposite of it, silence, can be heard, but when there is only silence, then nothing is heard. This silence swallows music, but the tone of the poem indicates that this silence is not attainable. 2. If the sand of silence cannot stop music, may be the sea of language can. The speaker wants the people surrounding him keep silence as he needs himself not to be silent, he wants to hear his selfs voice. In the presence of the others he is not himself and their voices disturb his internal dialogue, which is one of his vital symptoms. He wants to break his silence to be. The other reading of I may hear no more /me silent is hearing yourself speaking. But as the first line has a very strong and single meaning in comparison to the rest of the poem, I think the empire of the music can never fall even in the presence of language.

The ambivalent attitude of the speaker toward the concepts of silence, language and music is so clearly elaborated in this poem. Silence and language are at the same time desired and undesired. That 53

is the case with music: up to now I gave the indifference of music a negative value according to Pilling. But Harvey, when discussing this poem finds indifference of a great value to the speaker. So music of indifference due to its ignoring all the essentials of life and the existence of speaker can be an enemy, and at the same time because of its valuing nothing more that the other and breaking all the hierarchies is so desirable to the speaker. The speaker is not even sure about his being, or wanting to be, in the microcosm of his solitude with the noises of silences of it, or in the macrocosm of the world. This will be discussed more in the coming chapter. So silence is the desired and undesired, necessary and impossible in the poems of Beckett. He has an ambivalent attitude towards this concept as it leads to peace and at the same time erasure of self. Self can only exist in language. But even when he wants silence to happen, he finds it impossible. This is what Derrida has been concerned about and agreed with Beckett.

Music
One of the other main motifs Beckett is obsessed with is music. This is the reason why he chooses poetry as his favorite genre: music is silence and language at the same time. There are no words in it but it is not a killing silence as well. It is in the realm of heart, just like poetry: to understand music one should give up knowledge, it is returning to the ignorance of Adam and Eve before picking up the apple of knowledge from the tree. It is the closest language to the pure language, to the language of God, as it is universal, untranslatable, and without signifying any thing other than itself. In music there are no values and oppositions which exist in language of words. Of course there are moments when the attitude of Beckett toward music changes, as it happens with language and music: when he is scared of silence as it is close to nothingness, music as the sister of silence is the source of fear for him. And when he is tired of the boundaries of language, and even silence, he longs for music because of its threshold-like nature: between the noisy land of everything and the wasteland of nothing, peace and struggle, being and non-being. There are two issues about music to discuss in Becketts poems. One is the conceptual approach to understand his idea about this issue which is so close to the Derridean deconstruction mainlines. The other is based on the language of the poems which helps in learning the use of music in Becketts poetry. In this reading the way Beckett deconstructs the binary opposition of language and music will be expressed: words become musical notes and loose their meaning or value, only their sounding and repetition makes the poem and the feeling the reader/audience gets from it. This is not that far from the 54

Derridean/Beckettian definition of the poem as it id felt rather that learnt. Here the thematic reading will be done first and then the more linguistic approach will be used. One of the best instances of Becketts discussing music in his poetry is in the last poem of the collection Echos Bones, of which the collection has derived its name. The poem confirms the rejection of rhetoric. The poet has kept on the move as Serena III advised, walking on the earth that was a muse in Serena II but which is now a grave. The decay of her flesh leaves Echo only her bones and her voice, but there is still the jocularity of muffled revels and a breaking wind which sounds distinctly flatulent and which no longer needs to annul the mind (as in Enueg I). The dry mock of the rejected lover of Narcissus is seen to be courageous in so far as it requires commitment on the very perilous ridge between sense and nonsense, but foolhardy in so far as the maggots have no problem telling them apart, and cat the bones as a matter of course. Echos bones are turned to stone and she is left with only her voice. The idea surfaces again in Embers thirty years later: You will be quite alone with your voice, Ada tells Henry, there will be no other voice in the world but yours. And so the volume of what on first publication were called Sprecipitates closes with a poem of muffled revelry that runs the gauntlet of sense and nonsense dispassionately, without fear or favour. The serene tone of Da tagte es has prepared us for a poem like this, and it is intended to balance the poem with which the volume began. But to say that the panic of Serena II has been surpassed is to indicate at one and the same moment what has been gained and what has been lost. Coming to Cascando from Echos Bones one observes how far it is the voice itself, which is now being subjected to panic as the only trust. This is announced in the first three lines, where the poet decides to allow the occasion of utterance to lead where it will: why not merely the despaired of / occasion of / wordshed. One compensation is that the subject-matter can be squarely faced, with none of the obliqueness we associate with the more centrifugal poems in Echos Bones. Part of the panic is that the voice is conscious of the sentimentality it had failed to censor in Echos Bones. The desired silence in Echos Bones shows its impossibility in Cascando as the poet finds no way out of language and wordshed. There is a late play by Beckett naming Cascando, which is so close in this subject to the poem. In the play the speaker is in search of a final piece of art which can say everything he wants and after that he will keep silence but he cannot succeed, and at last this is music. The sixth poem of the first French collection speaks of the musique dindiffirence that we first experienced in Echos Bones, as if the poet is well aware that indifference has been under threat in the preceding poem. The bones of Echo have now fragmented into essentials (coeur temps air feu; 55

heart time air fire), expressing the boulement damours (atrophy of loves). All he can do is break the pose of indifference and make a pitiful plea to the sable / du silence (sand / of silence). The true music, in other words, is beyond even bones as elemental as this. It is above all utterances and silences. Music is neither of them and at the same time both of them: it stands on the threshold of their opposition and shows that there is no black and white distinction in life, music is the third option, the grey. Up to now the Beckettian deconstructional reading of music looking through the content of the poems was discussed and the following steps were taken. But to go to the other reading of the concept of music first the poems should be read in light of formalism and then the gaps or black holes, as Derrida calls it, which give a hint of the deconstruction of the ideas about music and language should be found, and then an elaboration of the collapsing of the binary oppositions is needed. Although there is no methodology in deconstruction, Paul de Man and other deconstructionalists use it consciously or unconsciously. Here it is needed to use this second method as it is more organized and good for focusing on the form of the poem, but this does not mean that there is a big difference in finding the undecidability and self-deconstructiveness of Becketts art. Actually the first and second ways are the same in aim, but the second has a more formalistic primary steps. The best example of the use of music in the poems is in Roundelay and Dread nay, about which Elizabeth Drew has written an essay. There she claims
As he indicated in conversation with Harold Hobson, Samuel Beckett was interested in the shape of ideas often more than in ideas themselves (qtd. in Hobson, 153). This concern is evident in the elaborate patterning in earlier works, but in the later part of his writing career, the shape of expression comes to the forefront in the radical absence of the expected elements of literary works. As Becketts work becomes less naturalistic and more minimalistic, shapes provide a more significant part of the experience. The term shape connotes aural and figurative patterns as well as the more obvious notion of spatial geometry. (291)

The aural shape of these poems is of a great importance and even more important than the meaning of words, as the shape is telling in itself and there is no need for the over elaboration of language. The fundamental sounds the language is reduced to in Becketts late poetry are acutely evident due to the absence of distracting complexities. In Dread nay each line is divisible into a rising and falling rhythm. Forty-eight of the poems sixty-four lines have only two words, and thirty lines are comprised of two one-syllable words of equal stress. These consist of a beginning and an end, emphasizing transitions over continuity. The entire poem creates an experience of a death-like calm being interrupted violently 56

by a moment of vision, as deadening habit is intermittently interrupted by painful insights. The difficulty in reconciling moments of vision with the times when the eyes are closed, as if the other had never been, invites analogy with other unfathomable transitions, especially the shifts from nonexistence to life to death.
head fast in out as dead till rending long still faint stir unseal the eye till still again seal again ............ so ere long still long nought rent so so stir long past head fast in out as dead

Roundelay, composed in 1976, enacts the rhythm and shape of the act of walking through its aural patterning and repetitive structure (Drew, 294).
on all that strand at end of day steps sole sound long sole sound until unbidden stay then no sound on all that strand long no sound until unbidden go steps sole sound long sole sound on all that strand at end of day

The tightly knit organization of the poem contrasts with its setting on the strand, an open space bounded only by the expansiveness of the shifting sea. The symmetrical structure has only very subtle difference in a few related lines. The minute variations in wording exchanging the stay in line 5 for go in line 9, and interchanging sole and no in several lines also linked both by the repetition of phrases and their position in the poem make stasis and movement (stay and go) as well as 57

existence and non-existence (sole and no) seem identical.3 The formal and situational repetition in Roundelay is strengthened by the tightly intertwined repetition of sounds. The consonants s, n, and d are extraordinarily prevalent in this thirteen-line poem. Combined with the near total absence of unstressed syllables, the aural equivalence of successive sounds mimics the beat of footsteps, the sole sound on the strand. At the same time, the phonetic and rhythmic beat of the poem remains consistent when the figure is stopped or absent, emphasizing the minuteness of the difference between movement and stasis at the root of the self (Drew, 295). Of course these two poems are not the only poems Beckett has used the aural faculty of the words as a prominent aspect, and even stronger that the meaning they convey. But in these poems the whole poem has this specification, as the meaning of the poem in general is transferred to the reader by means of voices, while in other poems may be this has been done for a part. Here words become musical notes and music becomes language. The binary opposition of language/music is deconstructed as they are in need of each other and supplementary. If there was no music there would be no communication which is the aim of language. One can go a step further and claim that music becomes language her. On the other hand this is through the sounding of words which music takes place: language is music in these poems. So not only the two sides of the oppositions are supplementary, but also they are identical. In this section the concept of music in the poems of Beckett in terms of content and form. In the content part, music is discussed as the ultimate means of communication: it is free of translation. Focusing on musical language of the poems, the reader can find out that the poet is rarely used the classical musical features like rhythm and rhyme, but repetition has played the role of them and brought music to the poems. Repetition reduces words to a voice, a musical note, which by its repetition makes a musical piece rather than a poem.

Translation as Impossible and Necessary

Perhaps all of the poetic works he does in order to mark his patronym in his text, either in pieces or in an integral fashion, is a means not only of misleading the reader or the detectivesthe critical detectivesbut also of losing himself. Perhaps he doesnt know his proper name. (Derrida, Ear 106)

Translation is another linguistic-literary field with which Derrida has been so concerned. He refers to the three phases of creation of man and world in John `s Bible. First it has been Word, and the word 58

was God. So God and his name are the same and there is no distance between signifier and the signified or referent. The first phase is the creation of light and God says Let there be light and there was light. So again there is no distance. But for creation of man God used matter (mud) as well. This phase is called Appellation or naming the things God created by man. Although things were not the words any more but they signified the thing itself and there was no value or metaphysical meaning behind. The second phase is called The Tree of Knowledge. Here the first fall of man appears as he, who is banned from eating from the Tree of Knowledge, disobeys Gods word and eats it. So he/ she gains knowledge which is metaphysical. Knowledge stands out of the context of language and is a means to judge and put value on things. This is the first time that Adam and Eve hide themselves from God as they feel ashamed for their being naked. This hiding is a turning point because after that man and God are separated and man has been always in search of God from that moment on. The Third Phase is named Tower of Bible. People of the world are gathered to build a Tower to reach the heaven. But as God does not want them to unite or reach him destroys the tower and scatters them all around the world with different languages.
God declares war on the tribe of the Shems, who want to make a name for themselves by raising the tower [of Bible] and imposing their tongue on the universe. Then Yahweh interrupts the construction of the tower and condemns humanity to the multiplicity of languageswhich is to say, to the necessary and impossible task of translation. (Derrida, Ear 98)

So from this stage on, man is to translate to make himself understood. But the name of God, which is Bible, which is God himself as God is the word, cannot be translated, and at the same time it is necessary to be translated. So the act of translating His Name is aporiaic (Nojoumian, Bible 15-23). And Derrida claims that it is so about translating every text, as every text is idiosyncratic and like a proper name. A text needs translation in order to survive. And if it is translated, it is neither alive nor dead (Zende Budi, 14). Beckett is interested in the subject of translation, as he translates others and his own works, in a telling way: he treats the translation he has of others as his own work and translation of his own works are different from the original text. The whole idea of ones writing in one language and translating himself is problematic as well. In Disjecta he claims
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 itbe it something or nothingbegins to seep through. (172)

Derrida has a similar idea about this subject which he explains in The Ear of the Other 59

it is an operation of thought through which we must translate ourselves into the thought of the other language, the forgotten thinking of the other language.(115)

Beckett wants to touch all the limits of language so he writes in other language and then translates. Any translation is different and the same with the original text. That is why he calls his translation of other poets like Mallarme his own poem: the name of his first published verse and verse translation collection is Collected Poems, without mentioning its including translations. This clarifies his agreeing with Derridas claim: Translation is writing (Ear 153). Nojoumian in his essay Jacques Derrida: Translation and the Paradox of Decadence and Survival claims: Derrida sees translation as inevitable. Translation is inevitable in the sense that the translation preserves the multiple meanings of the original text and in turn demands more translations to create more multiple meanings (27). Becketts seems to agree with this idea as his translating his own works is writing them again and multiplying the meanings of it. This is the case with the last poem of Quatre Poemes, where the poet puts the reader in the aporia of considering First and last to love me of the English poem, synonym or antonym with celle qui crut maimer (one who thought she loves me). I have discussed the many readings each option leads to in the previous chapter. The multiplicity of meaning of the original text doubles in translating it, as the two texts seem to be different with different multiple meanings. It puts the reader in the problem of considering the original text and the translation the same and the phraseseither same or different in the two textscarrying the same meanings or not. But what gives Beckett the right to do so? What is the unmentioned rule of translation that every reader accepts and considers such different texts from their originals as translation? Derrida says There is something untouchable, something of the original text that no translation can attain (Ear 114). This untouchable thing is what Benjamin calls Kernel in his The Task of the Translator. As no translator, no matter he is the writer of the original or not, cannot transform the original text to another language. There is always something missing and Beckett has used and implied this in his verse translations. He completely knows about the untranslatability of literature and poetry especially and tries to suggest and even abuse it by translating his own and others text in a specific manner which made them quite different from the original, although it was their translation at the same time. Derrida agrees with Becketts idea and act as he says when one does something poetic, one makes for sacredness and in that sense one produces the untranslatable (Ear 149). And in A Letter to a Japanese Friend, where he discusses the translatability of the word 60

deconstruction, he asserts the impossibility of translating poetry, above other texts. Literature is sacred as Benjamin refers literature or poetry to a religious or sacred model, because he thinks that if there is something untranslatable in literature [and in a certain way literature is the untranslatable], then it is sacred (Ear 148). Poetry is the most sublime form of literature and consequently the most untranslatable text. So by translating his own and others texts, Beckett does not mean to be loyal to their texts as it is impossible. He just wants to help the text and the meaning behind it survive in another language for other readers. This is the demand of each original text. The original is in the situation of demand, that is, of a lack or exile. The original is indebted a priori to the translation. Its survival is a demand and a desire for translation (Ear 152). So the task of a translator according to Beckett, Derrida, and Benjamin, with whom Derrida shares his ideas in The Ear of the Other, is not the task of a transformer, he is rather a survivor.
Given the surviving structure of an original textthe task of the translator is precisely to respond to this demand for survival which is he very structure of the original text..The translator must neither reproduce, represent, nor copy the original, nor even, essentially, care about communicating the meaning of the originala good translation is one that enacts that performative called a promise with the result that through the translation one sees the coming shape of a possible reconstruction among languages. (122-123)

Translation is what helps man get closer to the pure language. [T]he translator, through the decayed barriers of his own language, releases the pure language (Nojoumian, Kinship 29). That is why Beckett and Derrida who were so obsessed with the concept of language were so interested in translation. According to John Fletcher The English version of the three [poems] that Beckett has translated are masterly, sometimes denser than the originals and always apt ( e.g. in a convulsive space for dans un espace pantin) (32). Translations writes
Are the translations of Part Three[of Becketts Collected Poems], those from various French writers, to be accorded the same importance as Becketts original poems, whether in French or English? We are probably disinclined to think so, yet they figure as poems wittingly collected by Beckett and incorporated into his canon. They furthermore form the longest and what might be considered the culminating section of the book. (187)

And Roger Little in Becketts Poems and Verse

Beckett deconstructs the binary opposition of original/translated text. They are supplementary and in need of each other. Translation does not come along in addition, like an accident added to a

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full substance; rather, it is what the original text demands (Derrida, Ear 153). The translated text is in need of the original as well, as its existence is based on being an original of which it is translation.

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Chapter Four: Self-deconstructiveness of Imagery

Imagery is the medium of a work of art, especially poetry. It is through stream of images, which the author puts and arranges in a specific way the imparting of his ideas to the reader implicitly. A good work of art uses images in different meaningful ways while no direct idea is given. The imposing of one meaning theoretically by the author degrades the work, but by using images, through different meanings the reader produces, all the dimensions of the authors thought are revealed. Therefore, the best use of imagery is the equivocal, non-clear-cut usage that enables the author and reader alike to feel the meaning, which is never clear-cut. Of course, most of the writers, although using this kind of imagery, try not to make the reader face with a kind of aporia in understanding the meaning and territory of the image. But Beckett has not gone through such a work, and even has tried to make ambiguous and ambivalent images, as the whole world and meaning are such to him. It seems that by

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doing so Beckett has imitated the reality of life and shown it to his reader perfectly. It is not clear whether the speaker of the poems is describing a world without (Macrocosm) or the world within (Microcosm): in some poems, the setting is a room with windows, representing the house of the mind with eyes. This is of course one of motifs in Becketts art; for instance, he has used the same imagery in Endgame. Another characteristic of Becketts use of imagery is that one image may have several signifieds. The double treatment of imagery in Becketts poetry, which leads to a kind of Derridean aporia and undecidability, is what the researcher is going to discuss in this chapter.

Between Two Worlds: Microcosm/ Macrocosm

In his book, Dissemination, Jacques Derrida talking about one of the poems of Mallarm, Le Livre, claims
isnt the book the internalization of theater, the inner stage?in inserting a sort of spacing into interiority, it [the mimed operation] no longer allows the inside to close upon itself or be identified with itselfThis impossibility of closure constitutes not a reduction but a practice of spacing. Staked on the structure of the fold and of supplementarity, this practice puts itself into play. (243)

Here Derrida discusses the natural and necessary being of mingling the inside world with the outside and finds these two worlds supplementary. Then the territory of the images is the territory of fold, hymen, or threshold and the undecidability made by such imagery will lead to a play of different meanings and lack of closure. This is the case with Becketts poetry too. His imagery has the same faculty Derrida has found in Mallarms poem: whenever he is talking of an image belonging to the macrocosm, suddenly a phrase takes the reader to the microcosm of the mind of the speaker (or vise versa). This then leaves the reader in an aporia of deciding which world, without or within, is the world the speaker has in mind. Certainly, putting focus on each of these two territories will lead to different meaning and, and undecidability in choosing one will make the text open-ended. In Echos Bones in which most of the poems are about a journey in the outside real world one still can find references to this journeys being a search in the interior world of the speakers mind and

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memories. In Vulture, the poet suggests this: the sky/ of my skull shell of sky and earth. Therefore, his skull is unrecognizable from the sky and earth and in general, the macrocosm. According to Pilling
The interpenetration of subject and object of which Beckett spoke in Proust seems here to have been established without too much difficulty. The crushing of 'I' and 'other' into one space has taken place before the poem begins and the theatre of action has become entirely internal. (163)

But one cannot decisively claim that the external image of the vulture is not of any value. The image of a vulture as an object in the outside world is mingled with the image of the speaker as the artist who eats from the corpse of the ideas and art of the other dead artists, which belongs to the internal world of the writer. These two images are at the same time identical and different. The reader hardly can tell them from each other and separate them and decide which world the poem belongs to: inside or outside. The two Enueg poems cover a wide area. The form is a Provenal one, embodying a personal or general lament or complaint (Pilling, 164). The first poem traces the peregrinations of the poet after he has left the hospital where his beloved is dying of tuberculosis. The escape into nature is entirely without comfort; by a familiar poetic device the inner torment is projected on to the exterior world.
[I] toil to the crest of the surge of the steep perilous bridge and lapse down blankly under the scream of the hoarding round the bright stiff banner of the hoarding into a black west throttled with clouds

Such is the pressure of the torment that conventional syntactic utterance goes by the board. The effect is to situate dramatically within the poem a fragmented structure analogous to the poet's perception of phenomena:
Above the mansions the algum trees the mountains my skull sullenly clot of anger skewered aloft strangled in the cang of the wind bites like a dog against its chastisement.

So one can see this is not just a matter of a simple projection: speaker becomes one with his environment and the act of separating the image of inner and outer world becomes impossible. In the last three poems of Quatre Poemes the named location disappears, but the threshold situation (these long shifting thresholds as Beckett calls them) remains.

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However, the undecidable images are more dominant in Becketts late and mature poems, mostly French ones. The first line of the first poem of his first collection of French poems is elles viennent (they come), which names the poem. But the image is not completely described, so the women (elles is they for the women in French) can both come from some place in the outside world and the speaker may be watching them, or only it is their memories which come to the mind of the speaker. So here again the reader cannot tell microcosm from macrocosm. In the fourth poem of this collection, Ascension, the speaker is in a room by the window, which reminds the reader of the famous skull image of Beckett. Both the voice and image of football fans and the child can be recollections of the interests or memories of the speaker, or the things he is seeing from the window if his eyes, rather than the window of his room. The window is shut on the eyes of the late girl, open wide with surprise. Therefore, by analogy, as the speaker closes his eyes, and sinks in himself, he remembers the memory of his first love. (Translations are by Pilling, printed in his book Samuel Beckett)
with his filthy fingers he closed the lids on her green eyes wide with surprise she delicately rides my tomb of air

Anyhow, none of the discussed ideas about this poem is superior to the first meaning of image coming to the minda man in his room watching outside. Therefore again the reader faces the threshold-like setting of the work, a place between the world without and within and encounters another aporia. In the fifth poem, the poet is nowhere and everywhere, like the first poem. He can be in the microcosm and longing for silence of the memories, talking to his other, inside himself, asking it to cover the voices of the essentials (coeur temps air feu; heart time air fire), expressing the

'boulement d'amours' (atrophy of loves), as his internal world is noisy when he is silent in the external world. Or else, he can be in the macrocosm and talking to some external others who do not stop talking and make him sink in his memories( according to Harvey, people in a party).He wants these other men keep silence so that he can keep on thinking and be not silent in his internal world.
cover their voices so that I may hear no more me silent

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Again the reader cannot decide which image, and therefore, what reading is more proper, as both are implied in the work, and even are supplementary for each other, so he remains in his aporia. Beckett is one of the few thinkers and writers who could digest the true essence of life, which is undecidability, indifference and aporia, and could reflect it to the readers. The next poem repeats this ambivalence: enferm chez soi enferm chez eux (shut up at home shut up by themselves) [my translation], be putting these two besides, shows both their being same and different at the same time. This may simply mean being lonely at home, but besides, it can suggest that home is the mind of a man who is alone and by himself. In the eleventh poem of this collection, the theme of undecidability of the place and its being somewhere between microcosm and macrocosm is again dominant. The speaker is looking at his embodied memories in his house of mind.
From where we are seated higher than the tiers I see us enter from the Rue des Arnes side, halt, look up, then ponderously come towards us across the dark sand, more and more ugly, ugly like the others, but silent.

At last, the reader finds it contradictory as after the speaker being retired from remembering, the girl is beside him in flesh so microcosm is mingled with the macrocosm.
I shiver, it is I rejoining me, it is with other eyes that I now see the sand, the puddles underneath the drizzle, a little girl dragging her hoop behind her, a couple, lovers who knows, hand in hand, the empty tiers, the lofty houses, and the sky that lights us up too late. I return to myself, I am surprised to find her sad face there.

Pilling, too, suggests these two interpretations of the images, which lead to aporia as he claims: [this poem is] delicately, but not sentimentally, describing the movements of an eye that perceives its owner as object (176). This dividedness of the self is one of the main motifs of Becketts art as elaborated in his Unnamable: There were four or five of them [selves] at me (14). However, at the same time Pilling finds the poem a story in the external world of two people the speaker and a girl: They separate for a moment, and the man makes his way to the position he is occupying in the first line of the poem. The woman hesitates, takes a step towards the exit, and then follows him. They meet face to face(176). So are the other eyes at the same time the eyes of the 67

author and the eyes of the girl? Is the speaker experiencing the sameness with his beloved? It can be the case, but the most related reading to this chapter is that the real external experience is inseparable from the memories of the speaker. The speaker is watching this memory like a film so he is literally viewing himself. But at the same time the girl exists physically which surprises the speaker. One cannot tell the world without from the world within. Of course, some oversimplifying readings may exist like the speaker being detached from himself first but at last rejoining himself and finding peace in the external world. According to Pilling again

In one sense, this is Beckett's most optimistic poem since Alba in that it envisages the possibility of contentment from something outside the self, but it is at the same time one of his most depressing accounts of the persistence of memory and the passing of time. Only in art, the interpenetration of subject and object, can one catch a glimpse of paradise. (177)

So this easy reading of finding a possibility of contentment from something outside is rejected by Pilling. Here as Deconstruction is being applied to the texts, none of the readings, no matter how irrelevant they are, will not be put aside but some new, more problematic readings are suggested as above. As we saw, distinguishing the world the images belong tomicrocosm and macrocosmis an impossible task in reading Becketts poetry. According to Harvey, his images belong to a place between two worlds. The reason why this threshold is mostly found in his French Poetry is its calm static atmosphere, which reminds of the prolepsis of the mind of the speaker. According to Elizabeth Drew

The beauty of Becketts work lies in his way of putting forth in time and space, through sound and image, the essence of the condition of a timeless inner self. His late works train a macro lens on this conflict, generating a sense of space and moment in the immaterial territory of the mind. (292)

But as mentioned above, in his more dynamic early poems, there exist such moments of mingling outside with inside world in a way that one cannot be separated from the other. The reader has to accept both A. and Not A., the two poles of the binary opposition of in/out at the same time, as supplements.

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Equivocal Images
The images of Beckett are problematic and self-deconstructive and undecidable but not just because of the ambivalence between the two internal and external world place of reference of the images. Even when they belong to a place in the physical world, one cannot consider them as a single image referring to a fixed idea. Moreover, it is not the simple case of one image signifying several meanings. The Beckettian image is in itself multiple, and each single image is supplementary for the other.

the supplement supplements. It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-theplace of; if it fills, it is as one fills a void. if it represents and makes and image, it is by the interior default of a presence. Compensatory[supplant] and vicarious, the supplement is an adjust, a subaltern instance which takes-(the)-place[tient-lieu]. As substitute, it is not simply added to the possitivity of a presence, it produces no relief, its place is assigned in the structure by the mark of an emptiness. (Derrida, Acts 83)

So no image is prior to the other or fill the emptiness completely. The reader cannot simply take each image he/she wants, as it shatters the totality of the poem, but has to stay in the aporia made by this multiplicity. The text then finds no closure and signification undergoes the matter of diffrance. Derrida claims:
The ultimate aporia is the impossibility of the aporia as such. The reservoir of this statement seems to me incalculable. This statement is made with and reckons with the incalculable itself. (Derrida, Aporias 78)

This is the aporia Beckett tries to approach in his poems, through his ambivalent undecidable imagery. In Vulture, the image of a vulture is mingled with the image of the speaker as an artist who uses the dead memories or the art and subject of dead artists as his own material. The problem of choosing between these two images is completely irresolvable: this dialectic cannot have any synthesis, as having it will lead to a loss of meaning the poem tries to approach. Even the colors do not have the fixed, preoccupied significance in Becketts imagery. According to Harvey
In Enueg I The color green, so often associated with spring, hope, rebirth is linked with death and decay (the stillborn evening turning a filthy green. /the great mushy toadstool, greenblack, oozing up after me). The green tulips in Enueg II are also part of an atmosphere of physical and moral sickness and suffering.(120)

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This changing of the signified a signifier refers to, which is quite a revolutionary act, cannot be done completely. The signifieds are multiplied, not replaced. The common significances of green (spring, hope, rebirth) still exist, but the significance of death is added to them and have made them find a new meaning. There is a link between rebirth and death, which is made by green: for Beckett death is in life, there is no clear division between them, but man is always on the threshold of death and life. Therefore, green here is a metaphor for this threshold and the two area it links, the two opposite meanings it has in itself, are mingled and even are supplementary for each other, as life and death. As a result, here the binary opposition collapses which shows the self-deconstructiveness in the work. In Da Tagte Es, the sheet in hand makes two images at the same time, one is a sexual image, the second is the image of a sheet or handkerchief shaken good-bye for a beloved one who is leaving the land for somewhere else, or even for the underworld.

the sheet astream in your hand and the glass unmisted above your eyes redeem the surrogate goodbyes

It is just through putting these two images together that the reader can understand the idea of the speaker/writer about love and love making, strongly associated with death and loss. Therefore, the supplementary being of the images is clear. The undecidability in making any choice between images and the aporia situation is used intentionally by the author and that is what makes his work selfdeconstructive. In the third poem from the first French collection, there are two images, one of getting ready for a sexual intercourse, the other of crying, both needed for getting to the desired meaning and both dependent on each other. In let her moisten/as long as she likes till the elegy the speaker again implies the association of love and death, and the two images should necessarily be together without any priority to each other so that the idea can be transferred to the reader completely. The act of waiting in the poem can be both for lovemaking and for death and is suggested by the use of the undecidability in choosing one of these images. Another example is Calvary by Night, from Jettisoned Poems, in which the image is at the same time the image of a blossom and its short life reminding of the brevity of mans life, and the 70

image of firework at night which is similar to a blossom in form pointing satirically to the life of man with its ridiculous pleasures. Harvey claims the poem may well suggest every mans hard journey through darkness of life to his destiny as victim, but it can also slip towards the satirical, for it is vaguely reminiscent of travel posters advertising tourist delights: See Paris by Night (275). These two simultaneous meanings are in hand thanks to the two inseparable images.

rocket of bloom flare flower of night wilt for me on the breasts of the water it has closed it has made an act of floral presence on the water the tranquil act of its cycles on the waste from the spouting forth to the re-enwombing an untroubled bow of petal and fragrance kingfished abated drown for me Lamb of my insustenance

So it is through this multiplicity of images, and as a result multiplicity of meanings that the speaker, and by sequence the author, reaches his desired aporia which is the essence of human life. Each signifier (image) is a trace of other signifiers and cannot survive without them and be meaningful, although they may be absent and far from mind. Beckett himself in the second poem of his first collection of French poems says absence/ in the service of the presence (my translation). Therefore, to him this absence of the clear dominant image and as a result a clear meaning is what gives his present work and image a meaning. That is the gist of the idea of absence and supplement by Derrida
Through this sequence of supplements a necessity is announced: that of an infinite chain, ineluctably multiplying the supplementary meditations that produce the sense of the very thing they defer: the mirage of the thing itself, of immediate presence, of originary perception. Immediacy is derived. That all begins through the intermediary is what is indeed inconceivable to reason. (Derrida, Acts 100)

It is this absence of a fixed reality, supplementary being of each pole of the binary opposition the images belong to, and the undecidability and aporia in taking one as the prior is what makes Becketts images in his poetry self- deconstructive. The reduction of the images the poet sees/describes gets to its prime in the latest poems. In Something There there is an outside versus inside image again: the whole globe/ Not bare yet, and the eyes open wide. The character in the poem looks from inside to the outside, and escapes inside, he in listening to a promising voice which says of something there, another territory, not 71

life/Necessarily. The source of this voice is not clear, there is a dialogue in the poem and that is all the reader is sure about. This voice can be the voice of one of the selves in the character, and can be the voice of a person outside, as the globe is not bare yet. This reminds us of Endgame, with the idea of the eyes as windows in the setting of the stage, an apocalyptic outside with a boy surviving, versus the inside several voices of the characters of the drama, who can be the several selves of the one, whose eyes are the windows. It is as if Beckett has taken us into the mind of man. But nonetheless it is not easy to say outside from inside clearly any how, as the presence of the characters is from time to time more colorful that the idea of their being a part of the absent one they are in it, although it is not a real absence as his mind is present as the stage. The look towards outside lasts Till in the end/ Nothing more/Shutters it again. At last, the outside world with its all threads vanishes, and the character remains with his eyes fixed on something out when there is nothing out there, this nothing is not life/ necessarily: lack of any image is death or non-life. Beckett looses his interest in images, either internal or external, as he gets to the end of his career/life. In the last piece of writing of his life, which is the poem What is the word, there is no particular image, the speaker talks of there, here, and other time and place pronouns but the reference of none of them is clear, it is as if he is standing in the middle of nowhere and no time. Therefore, in this chapter, the dedication of undecidable images in terms of both the world they belonged to and their being multiple in themselves to the self-deconstructiveness of the poems was clarified. By using this kind of imagery, Beckett tries to make the reader recognize the unrecognizable. It is this aporia of the reader, which is so close to the aporia man experiences in his daily life. Beckett has shown this in the best way possible, but most of the writers have tried to put it under erasure and Derrida, beside other deconstructionalists, to be with Beckett, and selfdeconstructiveness of his works (Derrida, Acts 60), become clear, as the two thinkers, both in their own way, want to show the impossible and simultaneously quest for it in life.

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Chapter Five: Conclusion

Findings In order to show the impossibility of making decision, in order to create situations of pure 'aporia', Beckett takes a logic of both/and, the two choices of which are contradictory and opposite. In his poetry the attitude he has toward some main motifs of life, language and images support this idea. His time is both healer and killer; it gives and takes life at the same time. Death to him is not another state, it is in life, and is even a supplement for it. The subject is both dead and alive in his poems. Talking about identity, man is both himself and other, and is always in an aporia of defining himself. Eroticism and physical love is to him a supplement for divine love, coming to the concept of love in the poems of Beckett. Physical love and spiritual love are the two sides of a binary opposition which are in need of each other and both form what real love is according to the poet. Here the boundaries between the two seemingly contracting ideas vanish, and the reader is left with the aporia of telling erotic love from the platonic one. Focusing on language, his shattered syntax relate to the displacements of limits of language which deconstructs it. The poetics of Beckett in his poetry is that of failure. He is aware of the incapability and failure of language is transferring meaning, and shows it by exaggerating this problem. He uses repetition, which makes the text static and dynamic at the same time, as a repeated word is a new word too, because the context has changed. This can be extended to the idea of repetitiveness of 73

time, which makes defining undecidable. The shattered syntax takes language to its edge, to a state between language and non-language. His syntax leads to aporia of reader in choosing one out of the many readings it may suggest and lack of closure, which is a main but exaggerated characteristic of language. But besides, in this syntax there is no grammar and rule, which are the main characteristics of language and define it. The silence which is implied both in form and content of the works is discussed as impossible and necessary. Silence is a form of speech so what we know as silence is both voice and voicelessness. Besides, the peace suggested by death sometimes becomes horrifying and death-like: sometimes the speaker of the poems becomes death-wishing and wants silence, but there are times which he is scared of the loss of presence and through it. Therefore there is and ambivalent mood regarding the uncatchable silence. Music is the best form of speech, which is not speech at the same time, to Beckett. Music is not silence but is not language too. But it has the some part of both. The lack of words is borrowed from silence and the communication from language. In this view it is even the best and purest language as it does not need any translation and is universal. In his translations even, Beckett uses the idea of both A and not A. His translations, either from himself or from the others, are both translation and non-translation. They are not original texts as they are a loose transference of another text in another language, into another language. But they are different from them in both form and content. Their language stands somewhere between the two languages and the reader will live the aporia of naming them translation or not. The purgatorial images as well as the sense of waiting and suspension which are always present in his poetry relate to Derrida's notion of 'diffrance'. The undecidability of time and waiting for the proper time to come, leads to paralysis and purgatorial images. The best time differs and defers, it is always to come and one cannot stop waiting for it. Therefore waiting in the Becketts art is a Derridean matter of diffrance. The undecidable setting of the images, the place between the microcosm and macrocosm, contributes to self-deconstructiveness in Becketts poetry. His imagery either belongs to somewhere between his inner microcosm and skull with its silence and monologues, which are closer to a dialogues between his several selves, or the macrocosm of world without. It is as if he is standing on the threshold of the two images and worlds. And even in the poems that the reader can decisively say the poet is standing the outside world, there are still several significances of a single image which mostly represent contradicting ideas like mourning and a lively love making. By the use of such 74

images, he deconstructs the idea behind each signified and shows its supplementariness with the other significances of each image. Besides, he leaves the reader with the aporia of choosing one signified over the other and relating the image to a particular meaning. This logic of both A and not A, as the shaping principle of his work, provide him with a critique of the metaphysics of presence which is based upon the binary oppositions. He has been a great thinker and philosopher besides being a literature man. Of course literature and philosophy have never been apart from each other, but philosophy has always tried to deny it. Derrida could show that philosophy is in need of literature and their binary opposition is vicious, as without literary language and figures of speech philosophy can get to nowhere and literature without having a though behind is nothing but a play with words. He deconstructed the western philosophy by this logic in his half literary, half philosophical texts. Beckett has done the very same thing in his poetry. Having all these theories hidden behind the surface of poetry in mind, one can easily understand why Harvey has named his book on the poems of Beckett Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic. He stands somewhere between these two seemingly opposite social roles, his being is deconstruction of this binary opposition. He deconstructs some rigid beliefs in life, besides his own texts, sharing the style and thinking-system of Derrida. That is why Derrida finds him close to himself and Attridge claims his art is self-deconstructive.

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Appendices: Poems by Samuel Beckett

Whoroscope Whats that? An egg? By the brothers Boot it stinks fresh. Give it to Gillot. Galileo how are you and his consecutive thirds! The vile old Copernican lead-swinging son of a sutler! Were moving he said were off-Porca Madonna! the way a boatswain would be, or a sack-ofpotatoey charging Pretender. Thats not moving, thats moving. Whats that? A little green fry or a mushroomy one? Two lashed ovaries with prostisciutto? How long did she womb it, the feathery one? Three days and four nights? Give it to Gillot. Faulhaber, Beeckman and Peter the Red, come now in the cloudy avalanche or Gassendis sun-red crystally cloud and Ill pebble you all your hen-and-a-half ones or Ill pebble a lens under the quilt in the midst of day. To think he was my own brother, Peter the Bruiser, and not a syllogism out of him no more than if Pa were still in it. Hey! pass over those coppers, sweet milld sweat of my burning liver! Them were the days I sat in the hot-cupboard throwing Jesuits out of the skylight. Whos that? Hals? Let him wait. My squinty doaty! I hid and you sook. And Francine my precious fruit of a house-and-

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parlour foetus! What an exfoliation! Her little grey flayed epidermis and scarlet tonsils! My one child scourged by a fever to stagnant murky blood blood! Oh Harvey belovd how shall the red and white, the many in the (dear bloodswirling Harvey) eddy through that cracked beater? And the fourth Henry came to the crypt of the arrow. Whats that? How long? Sit on it? A wind of evil flung my despair of ease against the sharp spires of the one lady: not once or twice but. (Kip of Christ hatch it!) in one suns drowning (Jesuitasters please copy). So on with the silk hose over the knitted, and the morbid leather what am I saying! the gentle cavas and away to Ancona on the bright Adriatic, and farewell for a space to the yellow key of the Rosicrucians. They dont know what the master of them that do it, that the nose is touched by the kiss of all foul and sweet air, and the drums, and the throne of the fcal inlet, and the eyes by its zig-zags. So we drink Him and eat Him and the watery Beaune and the stale cubes of Hovis because He can jig as near or as far from His Jigging Self and as sad or lively as the chalice or the tray asks. Hows that, Antonio? In the name of Bacon will you chicken me up that egg. Shall I swallow cave-phantoms? Anna Maria!

40

50

60

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She reads Moses and says her love is crucified. Leider! Leider! she bloomed and withered, a pale abusive parakeet in a mainstreet window. No I believe every word of it I assure you. Fallor, ergo sum! The coy old frleur! He tolled and legged and he buttoned on his redemptorist waistcoat. No matter, let it pass. Im a bold boy I know so Im not my son (even if I were a concierge) nor Joachim my fathers but the chip of a perfect block thats neither old nor new, the lonely petal of a great high bright rose. Are you ripe at last, my slim pale double-breasted turd? How rich she smells, this abortion of a fledgling! I will eat it with a fish fork. White and yolk and feathers. Then I will rise and move moving toward Rahab of the snows the murdering matinal pope-confessed amazon, Christiana the ripper. Oh Weulles spare the blood of a Frank who has climbed the bitter steps, (Ren du Perron.!) and grant me my second starless inscrutable hour. Notes

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80

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Ren Descartes, Seigneur du Perron, liked his omelette made of eggs hatched from eight to ten days; shorter or longer under the hen and the result, he says, is disgusting. He kept his own birthday to himself so that no astrologer could cast his nativity. The shuttle of a ripening egg combs the warp of his days. Line(s) 3 In 1640 the brothers Boot refuted Aristotle in Dublin. 4 Descartes passed on the easier problems in analytic geometry to his valet Gillot. 5-10 Refer to his contempt for Galileo Jr., (whom he confused with the more musical Galileo Sr.), and to his expedient sophistry concerning the movement of the earth. 17 He solved the problem submitted by these mathematicians. 21-26 The attempt at swindling on the part of his elder brother Pierre de la Bretaillire The money he received as a soldier. 27 Franz Hals 29-30 As a child he played with a little cross-eyed girl.

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31-35 His daughter died of scarlet fever at the age of six. 37-40 Honoured Harvey for his discovery of the circulation of the blood, but would not admit that he had explained the motion of the heart. 41 The heart of Henri iv was received at the Jesuit college of La Flche while Descartes was still a student there. 45-53 His visions and pilgrimage to Loretto. 56-63 His Eucharistic sophistry, in reply to the Jansenist Antonio Arnauld, who challenged him to reconcile his doctrine of matter with the doctrine of transubstantiation. 68 Schurmann, the Dutch blue-stocking, a pious pupil of Vot, the adversary of Descartes. 73-76 Saint Augustine has a revelation in the shrubbery and reads Saint Paul. 77-83 He proves God by exhaustion. 91-93 Christina, queen of Sweden. At Stockholm, in November, she required Descartes, who had remained in bad till midday all his life, to be with her at five oclock in the morning. 94 Weulles, a Peripatetic Dutch physician at the Swedish court, and an enemy of Descartes.

Jettisoned Poems
Gnome Spend the years of learning squandering Courage for the years of wandering Through the world politely turning From the loutishness of learning. Oofish offer it up plank it down Golgotha was only the potegg cancer angina it is all one to us cough up your T.B. dont be stingy no trifle is too trifling not even a thrombus anything venereal is especially welcome that old toga in the mothballs dont be sentimental you wont be wanting it again send it along well put it in the pot with the rest with your love requited and unrequited the things taken too late the things taken too soon the spirit aching bullocks scrotum you wont cure it again you wont endure it it is you it equals you any fool has to pity you so parcel up the whole issue and send it along the whole misery diagnosed undiagnosed misdiagnosed get your friends to the same well make use of it well make sense of it well put it in the pot with the rest it all boils down to the blood of the lamb

Calvary by Night the water

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the waste of water in the womb of water an pansy leaps rocket of bloom flare flower of night wilt for me on the breasts of the water it has closed it has made an act of floral presence on the water the tranquil act of its cycles on the waste from the spouting forth to the re-enwombing an untroubled bow of petal and fragrance kingfished abated drown for me Lamb of my insustenance till the clamour of a blue flower beat on the walls of the womb of the waste of the water Casket of Pralinen for a Daughter of a Dissipated Mandarin Is he long enough in the leg? Gi but his faice. oh me little timid Rosinette isnt it Bartholo, synthetic grey cat, regal candle? Keep Thyrsis for your morning ones. Hold your head well over the letter darling or theyll fall on the blotting. Will you ever forget that soupe arrose on the first of the first, spoonfeeding the weeping gladiator renewing our baptismal vows and dawn cracking all along the line Slobbery assumption of the innocents two Irish in one God. Radiant lemon-whiskered Christ and you obliging porte-phallic-portfolio and blood-faced Tom disbelieving in the Closerie cocktail that is my and of course John the bright boy of the class swallowing an apostolic spit THE BULLIEST FEED IN ISTORY if the boy scouts hadnt booked a trough for the elevenths eleventh eleven years after. Now me boy take a hitch in your lyrical loinstring.

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What is this that is more than the anguish of Beauty, this gale of pain that was not prepared in the caves of her eyes? Is it enough a stitch in the hem of the garment of God? To-night her gaze would be less than a larks barred sunlight. Oh I am ashamed of all clumsy artistry I am ashamed of presuming to arrange words of everything but the ingenious fibers that suffer honestly. Fool! do you hope to untangle the knot of Gods pain? Melancholy Christ that was a soft one! Oh yes I think that was perhaps just a very little inclined to be rather too self-consious. Schluss! Now ladies and gents a chocolate-coated hiccough to our old friend. Put on your hats and sit easy. Oh beauty! oh thou predatory evacuation, from the bowels of my regret readily affected by the assimilation of a purging gobbet from my memorys involuntary vomit violently projected, oh beauty! oh innocent and spluttering beautiful! What price the Balbee express? Albio Albion mourn for him mourn thy cockerup Willy the idiot boy the portly scullions codpiece. Now wholl discover in Mantegnas butchery stout foreshortened Saviour recognitions of transcendent horse-power? Sheep he wrote the very much doubting genial illegible landscape gardener. Gloucesters no bimbo and hes in Limbo

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so alls well with the gorgonzola cheese of human kindness. Though the swine were slaughtered beneath the waves not far from the firm sand theyre gone theyre gone my Brussels Braut! A Sonnet Taken from Dream of Fair to Middling Women At last I find in my confusd soul, Dark with the dark flame of the cypresses, The certitude that I cannot be whole, Consummate, finally achieved, unless I be consumed and fused in the white heat Of her sad finite essence, so that none Shall sever us who are at last complete Eternally, irrevocably one, One with the birdless, cloudless, colourless skies, One with the bright purity of the fire of which we are and for which we must die A rapturous strange death and be entire, Like syzygetic stars, supernly bright, Conjoined in One and in the Infinite! Text Miserere oh colon oh passionate ilium and Frances the cook in the study mourning an abstract belly instead of the writhing asparagus-plumer smashed on delivery by the most indifferential calculus that never came out or ever disdressed a redknuckled slut of a Paduan Virtue. Show that plate here to your bedfruit spent baby and take a good swig at our buxom calabash. Theres more than bandit Glaxo underneath me maternity toga. So she sags and heres the other.

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Thats the real export or Im a jungfrau. Now wipe your moustache and hand us the vaseline. Open Thou my lips and (if one dare make a suggestion) Thine eye of skyflesh. Am I a token of Godcraft? The masterpiece of a scourged apprentice? Where is my hippopots cedar tail? and belly muscles? Shall I cease to lament being not as the flashsneezing non-suppliant airtight alligator? Not so but perhaps at the sight and the sound of a screechy flatfooted Tuscany peacocks Strauss fandango and recitative not forgetting he stinks eternal. Quick tip losers narcissistic inverts. Twice I parted two crawlers dribbling their not connubial strangles in Arcadia of all places. Believe me Miss Ops swan flame or shower of gold. its one to ten at the time (no offence to your noble deathjerks) I know I was at it seven the bitch shes blinded me! Manto me dear an iced sherbet and me bloods a solid. We are proud in our pain our life was not blind. Worms breed in their red tears as they slouch by unnamed scorned by the black ferry despairing of death who shall not scour in swift joy the bright hills girdle nor tremble with the dark pride of torture and the bitter dignity of an ingenious damnation. Lo-Ruhama Lo-Ruhama pity is quick with death. Presumptuous passionate fool come now to the sad maimed shades and stand cold on the cold moon.

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HOME OLGA J might be made sit up for a jade of hope(and exile, dont you know) And Jesus and Jesuits juggernauted in the haemorrhoidal isle, Modo et forma anal maiden, giggling to death in stomacho. E for the erythrite of love and silence and the sweet noo style, Swoops and loops of love and silence in the eye of the sun and view of the mew, Juvante Jah and a Jain or two and the tip of a friendly yiddophile. O for an opal of faith and cunning winking adieu, adieu, adieu; Yesterday shall be tomorrow, riddle me that my rapparee; Che sar sar che fu, theres more than Homer knows how to spew, Exempli gratia: ecce himself and the pickthank agnuse.o.o.e. FOR FUTURE REFERENCE My cherished chemist friend lured me aloofly down from the cornice into the basement and there: drew bottles of acid and alkali out of his breast to a colourscale accompaniment (mad dumbells spare me!) fiddling deft and expert with the doubled jointed nutcrackers of the hens ovaries But I stilled my cringing and smote him yes oh my strength! smashed mashed (peace my incisors!) flayed and crushed him with a ready are you steady cuff-discharge. But did I? And then the bright waters beneath the broad board the trembling blade of the streamlined divers

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and down to our waiting to my enforced buoyancy came floating the words of the mutilator and the work of his fingerjoints: observe gentlemen one of the consequences of the displacement of (click)! the muncher. The hair shall be grey above the left temple the hair shall be grey there abracadabra! sweet wedge of birds faithless! God blast you yes it is we see God bless you professor we cant clap or wed sink three cheers for the perhaps pitiful professor next per shaving? next per sh..? Well of all the..! that little bullet-headed bristle-cropped red-faced rat of a pure mathematician that I thought was experimenting with barbed wire in the Punjab up he comes surging to the landing steps and tells me Im putting no guts in my kick. Like this he says like this. Well I just swam out nimbly blushing and hopeless with the little swift strokes that I like and.. whoops! over the stream and the tall green bank in a strong shallow arch and his face all twisted calm and patient and the board ledge doing its best to illustrate Brunos identification of contraries into the water or on to the stone? No matter at all he cant come back from far bay or stony ground yes here he is (he must have come under) for the second edition coming house innings set half or anything... if he cant come twice or forgets his lesson or breaks his leg he might forget me they all might.!

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so the snowy floor of the parrots cell burning at dawn the palaiate of my strange mouth.

HELL CRANE TO STARLING Oholiba charm of my eyes there is a cave above Tsoar and a Spanish donkey there. You neednt bring wine to that non-relation. And he wont know who changed his name when Jehovah sprained the seam of his haunch in Peniel in penile after hes sent on the thirty camels suckling for dear death and so many fillies that I dont want log tablets. Mister Jacobson mister Hippolitus-in-hell Jacobson we all know how you tried to rejoin your da. Bilha always blabs. Because Benoni skirted aftercrop of my aching loins youll never see him reddening the wall in two dimensions and if you did you might spare the postage to Chaldea. But theres a bloody fine ass lepping with stout and impure de pommes in the hill above Tsoar.

FROM THE ONLY POET TO A SHINING WHORE For Henry Crowder to sing. Rahab of the holy battlements, bright dripping shaft in the bright bright patient pearl-brow dawn-dusk lover of the sun. Puttanina mia! You hid them happy in the high flax, pale before the fords

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of Jordan, and the dry red waters, and you lowered a pledge of scarlet hemp. Oh radiant, oh angry, oh Beatrice, she foul with the victory of the bloodless fingers and proud, and you, Beatrice, mother, sister, daughter, beloved, fierce pale flame of doubt, and Gods sorrow, and my sorrow.

RETURN TO THE VERSITY Lover off with your braces Slouch in unbuttoned ease fill a sack take a porter climb a mountain as he did the deaf conceited lecherous laypriest the vindictive old sausage-sprinkler dirt in a dirt floor in a chapel barn by a stifled stream Zoroaster politely factorized and a hay-rake guarantee his siesta except during the harvest season when the latter is removed. I may be mistaken but tears covering all risks I took a time exposure and wept into my hat So swell the cairn and spill the doings, Burn sulphur! Jupiter flame to a swirl of ashes! Down the Singer Im done with stitch anguish. Now a compress of wormwood and verbena on my fiery buttocks Smother the place in Cerebos it stinks of breeding. Heres the mange of beauty in a corporation bucket! Shovel it into the winds! Loose the sparrows. Pluck that pigeon she dribbles fertility. Mumps and a orchid to Frulein Miranda.

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Gentle Anteros dark and dispassionate come a grave snake with peace to my quarry and choke my regret noble Anteros and coil at the door of my quarry tomb and span its rim with a luminous awning shallow and dim as a grey tilt of sil filtering sadly the weary triumph of morning. Or mock a duller impurity. YOKE OF LIBERTY The lips of her desire are grey and parted like a silk loop threatening a slight wanton wound. She preys wearily on sensitive wild things proud to be torn by the grave crouch of her beauty. But she will die and her snare tendered so patiently to my tamed watchful sorrow will break and hang in a pitiful crescent. Echo's Bones The Vulture dragging his hinger through the sky of my skull shell of sky and earth strooping to the prone who must soon take up their life and walk mocked by a tissue that may not serve till hunger earth and sky be offal Enueg I Exeo in a spasm tired of my darling's red sputum from the Portobello Private Nursing Home it secret things

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and toil to the crest of the surge of the steep perilous bridge and lapse down blankly under the scream of the hoarding round the bright stiff banner of the hoarding into a black west throttled with clouds. Above the mansions the algum-trees the mountains my skull sullenly clot of anger skewered aloft strangled in the cang of the wind bites like a dog against its chastisement. I trundle along rapidly now on my ruined feet flush with the livid canal; at Parnell Bridge a dying barge carrying a cargo of nails and timber rocks itself softly in the foaming cloister of th lock; on the far bank a gang of down and outs would seem to be mending a beam. Then for miles only wind and the weals creeping alongside on the water and the world opening up to the south across a travesty of champaign to the mountains and the stillborn evening turning a filthy green manuring the night fungus and the mind annulled wrecked in wind. I splashed past a little wearish old man, Democritus, scuttling along between a crutch and a stick, his stump caught up horrible, like a claw, under his breech, smoking. Then because a field on the left went up in a sudden blaze of shouting and urgent whisttling and scarlet and blue ganzies I stopped and climbed the bank to see the game. A child fidgeting at the gat called up: "Would we be let in Mister?" "Certainly" I said "you would." But, afraid, he set off down the road. "Well" I called after him "why wouldn't you go in?" "Oh" he said, knowingly, "I was in that field before and I got put out." So on, derelict, as from a bush of gorse on fire in the mountain after dark, or, in Sumatra, the jungle hymen, the still flagrant rafflesia. Next:

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a lamentable family of grey verminous hens, perishing out in the sunk field, trembling, half asleep, against the closed door of a shed, with no means of roosting. The great mushy toadstool, green-black, oozing up after me, soaking up the tatteres sky like an ink of pestilence, in my skull the wind going fetid, the water . . . Next: on the hill down from the Fox and Gesse into Chapelizod a small malevolent goat, exiled on the road, remotely pucking the gate of his field; the Isolde Stores a great perturbation of sweaty heroes, in their Sunday best, come hastening down for a pint of nepenthe or moly of half and half from watching the hurlers above in Kilmainham. Blotches of doomed yellow in the pit of the Liffey; the fingers of the ladders hooked over the parapet, soliciting; a slush of vigilant gulls in the grey spew of the sewer. Ah the banner the banner of meat bleeding on the silk of the seas and the arctic flowers that do not exist. Enueg II world world world world and the face grave cloud against the evening de morituris nihil nisi and the face crumbling shyly too late to darken the sky blushing away into the evening shuddering away like a gaffe veronica mundi veronica munda give us a wipe for the love of Jesus sweating like Judas tired of dying

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tired of policemen feet in marmalade perspiring profusely heart in marmalade smoke more fruit the old heart the old heart breaking outside congress ? doch I assure thee lying on O'Connell Bridge goggling at the tulips of the evening the green tulips shining round the corner like an anthrax shining on Guinness's barges the overtone the face too late to righten the sky doch doch I assure thee Alba before morning you shall be here and Dante and the Logos and all strata and mysteries and the branded moon beyond the white plane of music that you shall establish here before morning grave suave singing silk stoop to the black firmament of areca rain on the bamboos flowers of smoke alley of willows who though you stoop with fingers of compassion to endorse the dust shall not add to your bounty whose beauty shall be a sheet before me a statement of itself drawn across the tempest of emblems so that there is no sun and no unveiling and no host only I and then the sheet and bulk dead Dortmunder Int the magic the Homer dusk past the red spire of sanctuary I null she royal hulk hasten to the violet lamp to the thin K'in music of the bawd. She stands before me in the bright stall sustaining the jade splinters the scarred signaculum of purity quiet the eyes the eyes black till the plagal east

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shall resolve the long night phrase. Then, as a scroll, folded, and the glory of her dissolution enlarged in me, Habbakuk, mard of all sinners. Schopenhauer is dead, the bawd puts her lute away. Sanies I all the livelong way this day of sweet showers from Portrane on the seashore Donabate sad swans of Turvey Swords pounding along in three ratios like a sonata like a Ritter with pommelled scrotum atra cura on the step Botticelli from the fork down pestling the transmission tires bleeding voiding zeep the highway all heaven in the sphincter the sphincter mde now potwalloping now through the promenaders this trusty all-steel this super-real bound for home like a good boy where I was born with a pop with the green of the larches ah to be back in the caul now with no trusts no fingers no spoilt love belting along in the meantime clutching the bike the billows of the nubile the cere wrack pot-valient caulless waisted in rags hatless for mamma papa chicken and ham warm Grave too say the word happy days snap the stem shed a tear this day Spy Wednesday seven pentades past oh the larches the pain drawn like a cork the glans ho took the day off up hill and down dale with a ponderous fawn from the Liverpool London and Globe back the shadows lengthen the sycamores are sobbing to roly-poly oh to me a spanking boy buckets of fizz childbed is thirsty work for the midwife he is gory for the proud parent he washes down a gob of gladness for footsore Achates also he pants his pleasure sparkling beestings for me tired now hair ebbing gums ebbing ebbing home good as gold now in the prime after a brief prodigality yea and suave suave urbane beyond good and evil biding my time without rancour you may take your oath distraught half-crooked courting the sneers of these fauns these smart nymphs clipped like a pederast as to one trouder-end sucking in my bloated lantern behind a Wild Woodbine

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cinched to death in a filthy slicker flinging the proud Swift forward breasting the swell of Strmers I see main verb at last her whom alone in the accusitive I have dismounted to love gliding towards me dauntless nautch-girl on the face of the waters dauntless daughter of desires in the old black and flamingo get along with you now take the six the seven the eight or the little single-decker take a bus for all I care walk cadge a lift home to the cob of your web in Holles Street and let the tiger go on smiling in our hearts that funds ways home Sanies II there was a happy land the American Bar in Rue Mouffetard there were red eggs there I have a dirty I say honorrhoids coming from the bath the steam the delight the sherbet the chagrin of the old skinnymalinks slouching happy body loose in my stinking old suit sailing slouching up to Puvis the gauntlet of tulips lash lash me with yaller tulips I will let down my stinking old trousers my love she sewed up the pockets alive the live-oh she did she said that was better spotless then within the brown rags gliding frescoward free up the fjord of dyed eggs anf thongbells I disappear don't you know into the local the mackerel are at billiards there they are crying the scores the Barfrau makes a big impression with her mighty bottom Dante and blissful Beatrice are there prior to Vita Nuova the balls splash no luck comrade Gracieuse is there Belle-Belle down the drain booted Percinet with his cobalt jowl they are necking gobble-gobble suck is not suck that alters lo Alighieri has got off au revoir to all that I break down quite in a titter of despite hark upon the saloon a terrible hush a shiver convulses Madame de la Motte it courses it peals down her collops the great bottom foams into stillness quick quick the cavaletto supplejacks for mumbo-jumbo vivas puellas mortui incurrrrrsant boves oh subito subito ere she recover the cang bamboo for bastinado

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a bitter moon fessade la mode oh Becky spare me I have done thee no wrong spare me damn thee spare me good Becky call off thine adders Becky I will compensate thee in full Lord have mercy upon us Christ have mercy upon us Lord have mercy upon us Serena I without the grand old Britich Museum Thales and the Aretino on the Bosom of the Regents's Park the phlox crackles under the thunder scarlet beauty in our world dead fish adrift all things full of gods pressed down and bleeding a weaver-bird is tangerine the harpy is past caring the condor likewise in his mangy boa they stare across monkey-hill the elephants Ireland the light creeps down their old home canyon sucks me aloof to that old reliable the burning btm of George the drill ah across the way a adder broaches her rat white as snow in her dazzling oven strom of peristalsis limae labor ah father father that art in heaven I find me taking the Crystal Palace for the Blessed Isles from Primrose Hill alas I must be that kind of person hence in Ken Wood who shall find me my breath held in the midst of thickets none but the most quarris lovers I surprise me moved by the many a funnel hinged for the obeisance to Tower Bridge the viper's curtsy to and from the City till in the dusk a lighter blind with pride tosses aside the scarf of the bascules then in the grey hold of the ambulance throbbing on the brink ebb of sighs then I hug me below among the canaille until a guttersnipe blast his crned eyes

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demanding 'ave I done with the Mirror I stump off in a fearful rage under Married Men's Quarters Bloody Tower and afar off at all speed screw me up Wren's giant bully and curse the day caged panting on the platform under the flaring urn I was not born before Defoe but in Ken Wood who shall find me my brother the fly the common housefly sidling out of darkness into light fastens on his place in the sun whets his siz legs revels in his planes his poisers it is the autumn of his life he could not serve typhoid and mammon Serena II this clonic earth see-saw she is blurred in sleep she is fat half dead the rest is free-wheelinf part the black shag the pelt is ashen woad snarl and howl in the wood wake all the birds hound the harlots out of the ferns this damfool twilight threshing in the brake bleating to be bloodied this crapulent hush tear its heart out in her dreams she trembles again way back in the dark old days panting in the claws of the Pins in the stress of her hour the bag writhes she thinks she is dying the light fails it is time to lie down Clew Bay vat of xanthic flowers Croagh Patrick waned Hindu to spite a pilgrim she is ready she has laid down above all the islands of glory straining now this Sabbath evening of garlands with a yo-heave-ho of able-bodied swans out from the doomed land their reefs of tresses in a hag she drops her young the wales in Blacksod Bay are dancing the asphodels come running the flags after she thinks she is dying she is ashamed she took me up on to a watershed

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whence like the rubrics of a childhood behold Meath shining through a chink in the hills posses of larches there is no going back on a rout of tracks and streams fleeing to the sea kindergartens of steeples and then the harbour like a woman making to cover her breasts and left me with whatever trust of panic we went out with so much shall we return there shall be no loss of panic between a man and his dog bitch though he be sodden pair of Churchman muzzling the cairn it is worse than dream the light randy slut can't be easy this clonic earth all these phantoms shuddering out of focus it is useless to close the eyes all the chords of the earth bloken like a woman pianist's the toads abroad again on their rounds sidling up to their snares the fairy-tales of Meath ended so say your prayers now and go to bed your prayers before the lamps start to sing behind the larches here at these knees of stone then to bye-bye on the bones Serena III fix this pothook of beauty on this palette you never know it might be final or leave her she is paradise and then plush hymens on your eyeballs or on Butt Bridge blush for shame the mixed declension of those mammae cock up thy moon thine and thine only up up up to the scar of evening swoon upon the little purple house of prayer something heart of Mary the Bull and Pool Beg that will never meet not in this world whereas dart away through the cavoerting scapes bucket o'er Victoria Bridge that's the idea

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slow down slink down the Rindsend Road Irishtown Sandymount puzzle find the Hell Fire the Merrion Flats scored with a thrillion sigmas Jesus Christ Son of God Savior His Finger girls taken strippin that's the idea on the Bootersgrad breakwind and water the tide making the dun gulls in a panic the sands quicken in your hot heart hide yourself not in the Rock keep on the move keep on the move Malacoda thrice he cam the undertaker's man impassable behind his scrutal bowler to measure is he not paid to measure this incorruptible in the vestibule this malebranca knee deep in the lilies Malacoda knee-deep in the lilies Malacoda for all the expert awe that felts his perineum mutes his signal sighing up through the heavy air must it be it must be it must be find the weeds engage them in the garden hear she may see she need not to coffin with assistant ungulata find the weeds engage their attention hear she must see she need not to cover to be sure cover cover all over your targe allow me hold your sulphur divine dogday glass set fair stay Scarmilion stay stay lay this Huysum on the box mind the imago it is he hear she must see she must all aboard all souls half-mast aye aye nay Da Tagte Es redeem the surrogate goodbyes the sheet astream in your hand

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who have no more for the land and the glass unmisted above your eyes Echo's Bones Asylum under my tread all this day their muffled revels as the flesh falls breaking without fear or favor wind the gantelope of sense and nonsense run taken by the maggots for what they are

Quatre Poemes Authors Translation Dieppe again the last ebb the dead shingle the turning then the steps toward the lighted town 2. my way is in the sand flowing between the shingle and the dune the summer rain rains on my life, on me my life harrying fleeing to its beginning to this end my peace is there in the receding mist when I may cease from treading these long shifting thresholds and live the space of a door that opens and shuts 3. what would I do without this world faceless incurious where to be lasts but an instant where every instant spills in the void the ignorance of having been without this wave where in the end body and shadow together are engulfed what would I do without this silence where the murmurs die the paintings the frenzies toward succour towards love without this sky that soars above it's ballast dust what would I do what I did yesterday and the day before peering out of my deadlight looking for another wandering like me eddying far from all the living in a convulsive space among the voices voiceless that throng my hiddenness

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4. I would like my love to die and the rain to be falling on the graveyard and on me walking the streets mourning the first and last to love me

First French Collection

I. they come others and same with each it is other and it is same with each the absence of love is the same with each the absence of life is the same. II. To her the calm act the clever pores the affable sex the waiting not so slow the regrets not so long absence in the service of the presence few fragments of blue in the head the spots finally dead of heart all the late grace of a rain ceasing to fall on an August night with her empty him pure of love III. to be there jawless toothless where the pleasure of loss is lost together with the scarcely inferior one of gain and Roscelin and we wait adverb oh little gift empty empty otherwise the wrecks of the song my father gave me to a husband or playing with fingers let her moisten as long as she likes till the elegy of shod horses' hooves still far from Les Halles or the riff-raff's water crumbles in the pipes or nothing more let her moisten perfect the excess and come with her idiot mouth with her hand formicating

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the hollow bulk the hollow eye listening to far-off tinkling scissor snips.

IV. Ascension across the thin bulkhead the day when a child prodigal in his own way will return to his family i hear the voice it is emotional it comments on the cup of world of football always too young at the same time by the open window by the songs the whole court the swell of the faithful their blood will spur out with abundance on the drapes on the sweet peas on their guy with his filthy fingers he closed the lids on her green eyes wide with surprise she delicately rides my tomb of air V. the fly between the scene and me the window empty except her hell for leather girt in its black guts antennae frantic wings tied down legs hooked mouth sucking emptiness slating the blue crashing into the invisible under my powerless thumb it capstizes the sea and the serene sky

VI. music of indifference heart time air fire sand of silence atrophy of loves cover their voice so that I may hear no more me silent

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VII. lonely wood grub burns adulterer bursts alone like before the absent ones are dead those still here stink pluck out your eyes divert them on reeds tease they or the as not the punishment there is the wind and wastefulness

VIII. so have we good not the good time and not the bad shut up at home shut up by themselves as if it was of yesterday remembering the mammoth the dinotherium the first kisses the ice ages not bringing any thing new the great heat of the thirteenth of their era on smoking Lisbon Kant coldly leaning dreaming in generations of oaks and forgetting his father his eyes if he had the moustache if he was good of what he is dead we are of it less eaten without appetite not the bas time and not the worst shut up at home shut up by themselves IX. Dieppe [This poem is translated by the author and included in Quatre Poemes]

X. Rue de Vangiard at mid-height I stop and gaping of guilelessness exposes the plate to light and shade then fortified meals of one unimpeachable negative

XI.Lutce Square From where we are seated higher than the tiers I see us enter from the Rue des Arnes side, halt, look up, then ponderously come towards us across the dark sand, more and more ugly, ugly like the others, but silent. a little green dog comes in a rush close to Rue Monge,

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she stops, she watches it it crosses the arena, disappeared behind the plinth of knowing Gabriel de Mortillet. She returns, I have left, I climb alone the rustic steps, I touch with my left hand the rustic banister, it is of concrete. She hesitates, takes an step to the way out of Rue Monge, then I follow. I shiver, it is I rejoining me, it is with other eyes that I now see the sand, the puddles underneath the drizzle, a little girl dragging her hoop behind her, a couple, lovers who knows, hand in hand, the empty tiers, the lofty houses, and the sky that lights us up too late. I return to myself, I am surprised to find her sad face there. XII. even in the cavern sky and earth and one by one the ancient voices from beyond the grave and slowly the same light which on the pains on Enna in long rape steeped recently the capillaries and the same laws as not so long ago adorable of uncertain void still the mouth of hell.

Second French Collection

I all right all right it is a country where the oversight where weighs the oversight gently on the unnamed world there the head we say nothing of it the head is silent and we know none we know nothing at all the singing of the dead mouths dies on the shore he traveled there is nothing in crying my solitude I know go I know it badly I have time that is what I tell myself I have time but what time starving bone the time of dog of pale sky non- stop my grain of sky

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of ray which climbs trembling eye of microns of the years of darkness you would want me coming from A to B I cannot I cannot exit I am in a trackless country yes yes it is a beautiful thing you have there a good beautiful thing what is it that does not ask me more questions spiral dust of instants what is it that is the same calmness love hatred calmness calmness

II. Death of A.D. and there being there thrust up against my old plank pock-marked with the black of blindly mixed up days and nights in being there in fleeing not and fleeing being there bent towards the confession of expiring time with having been what he was doing what he did with me with my friend dead yesterday the shiny eye the long teeth panting in his devouring beard the life of saints a life on day of life reviving at night their black sins dead yesterday while I lived and being there drinking down above the storm the unpardonable crime of time gripping old wood the witness of departures witness of returns III. live dead my lonely season read blank chrysanthemum lively nests abandoned mud of the leaves of April beautiful days grey of frost [Poems IV, V, and VI are translated by the author and included in Quatre Poemes]

Two Poems Cascando 1. why not merely the despaired of occasion of wordshed is it not better abort than be barren the hours after you are gone are so leaden they will always start dragging too soon the grapples clawing blindly the bed of want bringing up the bones

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the old loves sockets filled once with eyes like yours all always is it better too soon than never the black want splashing their faces saying again nine days never floated the loved nor nine months nor nine lives 2. saying again if you do not teach me I shall not learn saying again there is a last even of last times last times of begging last times of loving of knowing not knowing pretending a last even of last times of saying if you do not love me I shall not be loved if I do not love you I shall not love the churn of stale words in the heart again love love love thud of the old plunger pestling the unalterable whey of words terrified again of not loving of loving and not you of being loved and not by you of knowing not knowing pretending pretending I and all the others that will love you if they love you 3. unless they love you

Saint-L Vire will wind in other shadows unborn through the bright ways tremble and the old mind ghost-forsaken sink into its havoc Late Poems Thither Thither A far cry For one So little

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Fair daffodils March then Then there Then there Then thence Daffodils Again March then Again A far cry Again For one So little

Dread Nay Head fast In out as dead Till rending Long still Faint stir Unseal the eye Till still again Seal again Head sphere Ashen smooth One eye No hint when to Then glare Cyclop no One side Eerily One face Of out spread Vast in The highmost Snow white Sheeting all Asylum head Sole blot Faster than where In hellice eyes Stream till Frozen to Jaws rail

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Gnaw gnash Teeth with stork Clack chatter Come through No sense and gone While eye Shocked wide With white Still to bare Stir dread Nay to nought Sudden in Ashen smooth Aghast Glittering rent Till sudden Smooth again Stir so past Never been At ray In latibule Long dark Stir of dread Till breach Long sealed Dark again Still again So ere Long still Long nought Rent so So stir Long past Head fast In out as dead Something there Something there Where Out there Out where Outside What The head what else Something there somewhere outside

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At the faint sound so brief It is gone and the whole globe Not yet bare The eye Opens wide Wide Till in the end Nothing more Shutters it again So the odd time Out there Somewhere out there Like as if As if Something Not life Necessarily Roundelay on all that strand at end of day steps sole sound long sole sound until unbidden stay then no sound on all that strand long no sound until unbidden go steps sole sound long sole sound on all that strand at end of day NEITHER to and fro in shadow from inner to outer shadow from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither as between two lit refuges whose doors once neared gently close, once away turned 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

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then no sound then gently light unfading on that unheeded neither unspeakable home WHAT IS THE WORD for Joe Chaikin folly folly for to for to what is the word folly from this all this folly from all this given folly given all this seeing folly seeing all this this what is the word this this this this here all this this here folly given all this seeing folly seeing all this this here for to what is the word see glimpse seem to glimpse need to seem to glimpse folly for to need to seem to glimpse what what is the word and where folly for to need to seem to glimpse what where where what is the word there over there away over there afar afar away over there afaint afaint afar away over there what what what is the word -

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seeing all this all this this all this this here folly for to see what glimpse seem to glimpse need to seem to glimpse afaint afar away over there what folly for to need to seem to glimpse afaint afar away over there what what what is the word what is the word

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Works Cited
Banham, Gary. Cinders: Derrida with Beckett. Beckett and Philosophy. Ed. Richard Lane. Palgrave, 2002. Beckett, Samuel, George Duthuit. Three Dialogues." Samuel Beckett. A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Martin Esslin .Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965. ---. Collected Poems in English and French. New York: Grove Press, 1977. ---. The Unnamable. London: Calder & Boyars, 1958. ---. Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. Ed. Ruby Cohn. London: Calder, 1983. ---. Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Ed. Eoin OBrien, Edith Fournier. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1992. Benjamin, Walter. The Task of the Translator, Trans. Harry Zohn. The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti .London: Routledge, 2000. Blanchot, M. The Most High. Trans. and Introduction by Allan Stoekl. Canada:Bison Books, 2001. Carrigan, Cky J. Jacque Derrida, Deconstructionism & Post- modernism. May 2006. <http://ontruth.com/derrida.html> Coughlan, Patricia. The Poetry is Another Pair of Sleeves: Beckett, Ireland and Modernist Lyric Poetry. Modernism and Ireland: The Poetry of the 1930s. Coughlan, Patricia and Alex Davis. Cork: Cork University Press, 1995. Craig, Edward. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge, 2004. Davies, Paul. Beckett and Eros, Death of Humanism. Macmillan Press LTD, 2000. Davis, Colin .Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return of the Dead .England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Derrida, Jacques, "Letter to A Japanese Friend," Derrida and Diffrance, ed. David Wood and Robert Bernasconi, Warwick: Parousia, 1985. ---.Positions. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. ---. Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. London: Routledge, 1992. ---. Given Time: Counterfeit Money. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. USA: University of Chicago Press, 1992. ---. Che Cos La Poesia?, A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. Trans. And Ed. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Colombia University Press, 1991.

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---. How to Avoid Speaking: Denials. Derrida and Negative Theology. Ed. Harold Coward, Toby Foshay. New York: State University Press, 1992. ---. Text Read at Louis Althusser's Funeral.The Work of Mourning. Ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. ---. Aporias. Trans. T. Dutoit. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. ---. Cinders. Trans. and Ed. Ned Lukacher. London: University of Nebraska Press, 1991. ---. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. London: Continuum, 1981. ---. Post Card: FROM SOCRATES TO FREUD AND BEYOND. Trans. Alan Bass. USA: University of Chicago Press, 1987. ---. Spurs. Trans. Barbara Harlow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. ---. The Ear of the Other. Trans. Peggy Kamuf, Ed. Christie McDonald. London: University of Nebraska Press, 1985. ---. The Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. ---. Writing and difference. Trans. Allan Bass. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978. Drew, Elizabeth. Head to Footsteps: Fundamental sounds in Dread nay and Roundelay, Beckett Today/Aujourdhui. No. 11, 2001:291-298. Fletcher, John. The Private Pain and the Whey of Words: A survey of Becketts Verse. Samuel Beckett. A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Martin Esslin .Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965. Harvey, Lawrence. Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1970. Little, Roger. "Beckett's poems and verse translations or." The Cambridge Companion to Beckett. Ed. John Pilling. Cambridge University Press, 1994. Mahon, Derek. Watt is the word .Times Literary Supplement. 1 November 2006. Martin, Jennifer. Beckettian drama as Protest: A postmodern Examination of the Delogocentrism of language. January 2007. <http://www.themodernword.com/beckett/paper_martin.html>. Nojoumian, Amir Ali. Tower of Bible and the Genesis of Translation. Translation Studies. Vol. 3, No. 11, Autumn 2005. ---. Jacques Derrida: Translation and the Paradox of Decadence and Survival. Translation Studies. Vol. 4, No. 13, Spring 2006. ---. Samuel Becketts The Unnamable: The Story of That Impossible Place Named Silence. After Beckett. Ed. Anthony Uhlmann, Sjef Houppermans, Bruno Clment. New York: Radopi, 2004. ---. Walter Benjamin: Translation and the Kinship of Languages. Translation Studies. Vol. 3, No. 12, Winter 2006.

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Pilling, John. Samuel Beckett. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. "Samuel Beckett, or 'Presence' in the Theatre." Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays, Vol. I. Ed. Martin Esslin. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1965.108-16.

Royle, Nicholas. Deconstructions. London: Palgrave, 2003. Seaver, Richard W. A Samuel Beckett Reader. New York: Grove Press, 1976. Selden, Raman. A Readers Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory. Brighton, 1989. Shaw, Philip. The Sublime. London: Routledge, 2006. Sim, Stuart. The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, London: Routldge, 2005. Stewart, Paul. All Men Talk, When Talk They Must, The Same Tripe: Beckett, Derrida and Needle Wylie. After Beckett. Ed. Anthony Uhlmann, Sjef Houppermans, Bruno Clment. New York: Radopi, 2004. Stocker, Barry. Routledge Philosophy Guide Book to Derrida on Deconstruction. London: Routledge, 2006. Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today, A User-Friendly Guide. London: Garland Publishing, 1999. Zende Budi, Mehran. Translation in Jacque Derrida`s Philisophical Discourse.Translation Studies. Vol. 3, No. 11, Autumn 2005: 7-23.

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Index
Beckett industry ........................................ 8, 9 Death of A.D. ..................................... 19, 103 Repetition Compulsion ............................... 18 Three Dialogue" ......................................... 110 A Sonnet Taken from Dream of Fair to Middling Women ........................................ 82 Acts of Literature ......................................... 110 Alba .............................................. 39, 40, 68, 91 Allegory of wall ......................................... 7, 24 Althusser, Louis ..................................... 28, 111 Anti-foundationalism ....................................... 8 Aporia............................................................. 13 Aporias ................................................... 69, 111 Aristotle.................................................... 33, 78 Ascension ......................................... 23, 66, 100 Attridge, Derek......... 4, 7, 9, 17, 23, 45, 75, 110 Badiou, Alan .................................................... 9 Banham, Gary .............................................. 110 Begam, Richard ................................................ 9 Benjamin, Walter ......................................... 110 Binary oppositions ......................................... 14 Blanchot, M......................................... 9, 28,110 Calvary by Night ...................................... 70, 79 Carrigan, Cky J ............................. 7, 14, 15, 110 Cascando .................. 19, 21, 22, 37, 49, 55, 103 Casket of Pralinen for a Daughter of a Dissipated Mandarin ............................ 45, 80 Che Cos La Poesia .................................... 110 Christ ................................ 19, 77, 80, 81, 94, 97 Cinders. .................................................. 21, 111 Coughlan< Patricia........................... 39, 40, 110 Craig, Edward .......................................... 7, 110 Da Tagte Es .............................................. 70, 97 Davies< Paul .................................... 40, 41, 110 Davis, Coulin ....................... 10, 27, 28, 29, 110 Death of A. D ............................................... 103 Delogocentric ................................................... 8 Descartes, Rene ................ 18, 19, 32, 46, 78, 79 Dieppe ........................................ 21, 22, 98, 101 Diffrance 10, 12, 13, 14, 16, 18, 23, 33, 38, 69, 74, 110 Disjecta ...................................... 10, 45, 59, 110 Dissemination......................................... 64, 111 Dortmunder .................................................... 91 Dread Nay .............................................. 50, 105 Dream of Fair to Middling Women ............. 110 Drew, Elizabeth.............. 47, 56, 57, 58, 68, 111 Duthuit, George............................................ 110 Eaglestone, Robert ........................................... 9 Echo's Bones .................... 25, 29, 55, 64, 88, 98 Eliot, T.S. ....................................................... 30 Endgame ........................................ 6, 35, 64, 72 Enueg ............................... 31, 55, 65, 69, 88, 90 Equivocal ....................................... 4, 42, 63, 69 Erasure ........................................................... 14 Ergon........................................................ 37, 49 fin-de-sicle .................................................... 30 First French Collection.................................. 99 First Love ....................................................... 21 Fletcher, John ......................................... 61, 111 Guattari, Flix .................................................... 9 FOR FUTURE REFERENCE ....................... 84 Foucault, Michel .............................................. 9 FROM THE ONLY POET TO A SHINING WHORE ..................................................... 86 Bataille , Georges ............................................. 9 Deleuze , Gilles ................................................ 9 Given Time ................................. 18, 19, 43, 110 Gnome ............................................................ 79 God..... 41, 42, 53, 54, 59, 79, 80, 81, 85, 87, 97 Habermas ......................................................... 9 Happy Days ...................................................... 6 Harvey, Lawrence ... 8, 9, 23, 25, 43, 46, 54, 66, 68, 69, 71, 75, 77, 79, 111 Heidegger ......................................... 7, 9, 15, 52 HELL CRANE TO STARLING.................... 86 HOME OLGA ................................................ 84 How to Avoid Speaking .................... 46, 52, 111 Hymen ...................................................... 15, 18 Invagination ................................................... 16 Iser, Wolfgang.................................................. 9 Iterability ............................................ 15, 46, 47 Jettisoned Poems ...................................... 70, 79 Joyce,James .................................... 5, 19, 30, 32 Kant, Imanuel ................................... 15, 36, 101 Kristeva, Julia .................................................. 9 113

Lethargy ................................................... 23, 24 Letter to A Japanese Friend ......................... 110 Lvi-Strauss ................................................... 14 Little, Roger ................................................. 111 Logocentrism ................................................. 15 Lutce Square ......................................... 33, 101 Macrocosm . 4, 33, 36, 54, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 74 Mahon, Derek............................................... 111 Malacoda ............................................ 25, 32, 97 Mallarm ........................................................ 64 Malone Dies ..................................................... 6 Martin, Jennifer .................. 8, 15, 110, 111, 112 Merleau-Ponty.................................................. 9 Metaphysics ................... 7, 8, 13, 14, 16, 19, 75 Microcosm . 4, 22, 32, 36, 47, 54, 64, 66, 67, 68, 74 Molloy .............................................................. 6 Murphy ............................................................. 5 Mythopoetics .................................................. 10 NEITHER..................................................... 107 Nietzsche .......................................................... 9 Nihilism............................................................ 7 Nojoumian, Amir Ali .. 4, 32, 52, 53, 59, 60, 61, 111 Noumena ........................................................ 15 Oofish ............................................................. 79 Originary lack ................................................ 16 Paralysis ......................................................... 18 Parargon .................................................. 37, 49 Phaedo ........................................................... 16 Phaedrus ........................................................ 16 Phallogocentrism ............................................ 16 Pharmakon ............................................... 16, 18 Phenomena ......................................... 14, 15, 65 Pilling, John .. 22, 25, 27, 30, 31, 54, 65, 66, 67, 68, 111, 112 Plato ......................................................... 15, 16 Positions ....................................................... 110 Post Card ......................................... 18, 50, 111 Pound, Ezra .................................................... 30 Proust ............................................. 5, 18, 27, 65 Quatre Poemes . 21, 38, 41, 60, 65, 98, 101, 103 RETURN TO THE VERSITY ....................... 87 Rhetoric .................. 7, 11, 13, 21, 48, 49, 51, 55 Robbe-Grillet, Alain............................... 35, 112 114

Roundelay .................... 47, 56, 57, 58, 107, 111 Royle, Nicholas ...................................... 10, 112 Rue de Vangiard .......................................... 101 Saint-L........................................................ 104 Sanies ....................................................... 92, 93 Seaver, Richard. W ...................................... 112 Second French Collection ...................... 23, 102 Selden, Raman ............................................. 112 Self-Deconstructive........................................ 17 Serena I .......................................................... 94 Serena II ................................................... 55, 95 Serena III .................................................. 55, 96 Shaw, Philip ........................................... 37, 112 Signifieds ....................................... 4, 38, 64, 70 Signifier........................................ 38, 59, 70, 71 Sim, Stuart.................................. 14, 15, 16, 112 Sokhanvar Jalal ................................................ 4 Spurs. ........................................................... 111 Stewart, Paul .......................................... 52, 112 Stocker, Barry ........................................ 10, 112 Stoekl, Allan .......................................... 28, 110 Supplement ............................................ 16, 111 The Ear of the Other .................. 50, 59, 61, 111 the fly ............................................... 22, 95, 100 The Gift of Death ......................................... 111 The Unnamable .............. 6 ,32, 52, 53, 110, 111 The Vulture .................................................... 88 The Work of Mourning ................................. 111 Theodore W. Adorno ....................................... 9 Thither .............................................. 20, 47, 104 Threshold 10, 11, 17, 21, 23, 24, 33, 36, 37, 42, 49, 50, 51, 54, 56, 64, 65, 66, 68, 70, 74 Trace .............................................................. 16 Tyson, Lois ...................................... 12, 13, 112 Unchangeablity .............................................. 28 Undecidability ... 4, 7, 11, 12, 13, 17, 18, 26, 34, 35, 38, 40, 41, 44, 48, 50, 56, 64, 67, 70, 71, 74 Untranslatability............................................. 60 Waiting for Godot ............................................ 6 Walther von der Vogelweide ......................... 25 Watt. ................................................................. 5 WHAT IS THE WORD ............................... 108 Whoroscope ..................... 18, 19, 32, 43, 46, 76 Writing and difference ................................. 111

Yale School of deconstruction ......................... 7 YOKE OF LIBERTY............................... 30, 88

Zende Budi, Mehran .............................. 59, 112

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