Beckett and Dialectics by Eva Ruda

Author:Eva Ruda
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

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Beckett’s Unnamable Realism

Eva Ruda

One of the most distinctive features of Samuel Beckett’s work undoubtedly is the crowd of peculiar couple-characters wandering through and about his literary landscape: Vladimir and Estragon, Pozzo and Lucky, Hamm and Clov, Nagg and Nell, Willie and Winnie—to name but a few. As one can already gather from this cursory enumeration, the most famous representatives of this typically Beckettian species certainly originate from Beckett’s successful theater plays. Of particular relevance, they are, however, to his novels. For it is in these novels—and, as will be shown, through these novels even beyond them—that the couple-characters function as a veritable structure-forming principle. They are, as will be shown, an embodiment of a particular impossibility at the center of what can be said to be Beckett’s Unnamable Realism.

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The very first Beckettian couple-character, Neary and Wylie, appears already in Murphy (1938/1947), Beckett’s first novel, which means that the origin of Beckett’s novel-work immediately coincides with the origin of his peculiar couple-characters.1 However, Neary and Wylie are by no means the only double in this debut novel, for they are being redoubled yet again by an entire second line of further double-constellations. As Paul Shields has taken the trouble to highlight, there are “two coroners, two homosexuals, two waitresses, two fortune-tellers, two alcoholics, two Hindus, two alumni of Neary’s academy, two scholars, two doctors, two men with tiny heads and two men with large heads.”2 This twinning-mechanism spills right over in Beckett’s following novel, Watt (1953/1968), for here, too, the central couple-character of Watt and Knott is being redoubled yet again by a second line of further couple-characters: “Art and Con, Rose and Cerise, Cream and Berry, Blind Bill and Maimed Matt.”3

Undeniably, Beckett’s texts confront us with a curious compulsion to repeat, or more precisely and as Mladen Dolar has pointed out, with a curious compulsion to redouble.4 Each couple-character immediately evokes another couple-character, each double immediately redoubles yet again. Within Beckett’s novels, however, this process of redoubling takes on a unique form in that it does not restrict itself to the character’s text of origin (as is the case in Beckett’s plays), but instead, carries on even beyond the textual boundaries, right into the subsequent novels.

As with all of Beckett’s “creatures,” as the author liked to call his characters, it also holds for his novel-characters that, however hard they might try, they just cannot come to an end.5 “Immortality” would, however, be the wrong expression for this state. It is not that Beckett’s creatures live forever; rather, they simply can not stop dying. Yet, what distinguishes the “heroes” of Beckett’s novels is that in this undead state, they don’t just linger within the confines of their original text. Not only do they die across entire novels, but they keep on dying – even beyond the textual margins. Even after their novel has already ended and the book has already been closed, they still can’t stop going and thus coming to an end, continuing their (impossible) existence beyond the textual margins, passing on and over into one of the subsequent novels.

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