Samuel Beckett and the Terror of Literature by Christopher Langlois

Author:Christopher Langlois [Langlois, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, Political, Literary Criticism, General
ISBN: 9781474419024
Google: fDZYDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: 2017-06-09T01:11:54.679000+00:00

Notes

1. Alysia E. Garrison is therefore correct to argue that ‘as the historicist turn in Beckett studies attests, it is not enough to suggest’ that what Beckett is after in the post-war phase of his writing ‘is simply a dramatization of nothingness and absence’ (2009: 89).

2. Jonathan Boulter’s ‘“Wordshit, bury me”: The Waste of Narrative in Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing’ would be the most notable exception to the dominant trend in readings of Texts for Nothing. Acknowledging the value of those readings that share an affinity with Porter Abbott, Boulter insists that neither strands of interpretation ‘take into account that Beckett’s own assessment of Texts for Nothing is not necessarily dismissive but may in fact be a canny diagnosis of the work: that is, “failure” is not a negative critical term but functions as a theoretical assessment that may provide a valid starting point in our own critical reading of the work’ (2002: 2).

3. John Pilling contextualises Beckett’s negotiation of this problematic in relation to Beckett’s thinking about Sade, and specifically how Bataille and Blanchot were thinking about Sade during this period of transition between The Unnamable and Texts for Nothing. Pilling writes that ‘roughly half way through the composition of Textes, at the end of the first of the two notebooks in which they were written, Beckett jotted down a handful of phrases from Georges Bataille’s “Préface” to a limited edition de luxe reprint of Sade’s Justine. In this preface Bataille [. . .] wryly points out that there is an irresolvable paradox in Blanchot, whose emphasis on negation is difficult to square with him writing so fluently and at such length on what could not be negated without destroying itself. Beckett had been aware of this difficulty in the writing of Dream (1931–2) some twenty years earlier, but was obviously now even more alert to the problem, with L’Innommable having atomised almost everything and with the Textes proving difficult to dig out from under their avalanche of destruction’ (2014: 123–4).

4. In The Step/Not Beyond Blanchot writes that ‘the law’, by which he means the law as it is articulated by the fragmentary imperative of writing, ‘cannot transgress itself, since it exists only in regard to its transgression-infraction and through the rupture that this transgression-infraction believes it produces, while the infraction only justifies, renders just what it breaks or defies. The circle of the law is this: there must be a crossing in order for there to be a limit, but only the limit, in as much as uncrossable, summons to cross, affirms the desire (the false step) that has always already, through an unforeseeable movement, crossed the line’ (SNB 24).

5. Richard Begam takes up a similar line of argumentation in Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity, where he introduces his work as ‘focusing on the five major novels Samuel Beckett wrote between 1935 and 1950: Murphy, Watt, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. It will be my claim’, Begam writes ‘that these novels provide the earliest and most influential literary expression we have of the “end of modernity”’ (1996: 3).

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