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This essay examines the concepts of life and afterlife as they appear across Beckett’s trilogy, through focussing on representations of the act of burial, an act which draws attention to a caesura between biotic and abiotic conceptions of both life and afterlife. As the worlds of the trilogy become progressively less biotic, The Unnamable might be thought of as a laboratory in which the ‘lives’ of its characters are subjected to various biological experiments, experiments which suggest that narrative fiction, like the act of burial, is a kind of prophylactic against the fundamental processual nature of biotic life.

Prologue: In 2011, Erika Tophoven published a memoir of her and Elmar Tophoven's thirty-five years of collaborating with Beckett on the translation of his texts into German. The memoir is part of a book chronicling their life in Paris translating mostly French contemporary literature. Entitled Gluckliche Jahre: Ubersetzerleben in Paris (Happy Years: Our Life as Translators in Paris), the book, published by Matthes and Seitz in Berlin, includes her answers to questions posed by fellow author and translator Marion Gees and several essays by Elmar Tophoven (1923-1989). What follows is my compte rendu in English, summarizing and in part paraphrasing the Tophovens' recollections of meetings with Beckett and the problems they faced translating his texts. Erika Tophoven has kindly proofed my account, clarifying details and providing additional particulars, for which I am grateful to her. The translations into English of Beckett's French are my own.ANGELA MOORJANIAfter attending the premiere of En attendant Godot at the Theatre de Babylone in January 1953, there was no doubt in Elmar Tophoven's mind that this was a play he must translate and without delay. Willing to risk translating Beckett's tragicomedy without first obtaining the rights, he deposited the completed German Godot on Jerome Lindon's desk three weeks later. Thus, Lindon having granted the translation rights, began Tophoven's intensive collaboration with Beckett that was to last thirty-five years (95).1On two spring afternoons in 1953, Top, as he was known to his friends, worked with Beckett on the Godot translation in the author's studio apartment near the Vaugirard metro station on the rue des Favorites. In a letter of 19 February 1953 about setting up an eventual meeting to work on the translation, Beckett intimated that it would take a lot of effort but that they would finally get good results (qtd. 99; see also Beckett 2011, 370). Collaborating with Beckett turned out to be an intense, pleasant, and highly instructive experience for the translator. Beckett, he recalls, was patient throughout, hiding any annoyance about faulty and imprecise interpretations. He made Top aware of repetitions in the play, or 'echoes,' as Beckett termed them, and questions, which like recurring musical motifs resurface again and again, time among them (96).Accompanied by his translator, Beckett attended the premiere of the German Warten auf Godot at Berlin's Schlossparktheater on 8 September 1953, where, on the request of the play's director Karl Heinz Stroux, he joined the actors on stage, even if reluctantly, for the applause after the performance (96, 98).After Godot, author and translator worked on the translation of the postwar trilogy, the Nouvelles, and Textes pour rien (Texts for Nothing). From the beginning, Top was aware that Beckett's texts left a translator little latitude, owing to the precise meaning and placement of each word. Taking Beckett as his mentor, he gleaned much about the art of translation from him, an apprenticeship that was to prove useful in translating not only Beckett but also other writers (95).Erika Tophoven met her future husband in fall 1956 while visiting Paris after graduating from Munich's Dolmetscher-Institut (School for Interpreters). At their first meeting at a party, Top asked her to translate Beckett's recently composed radio drama All That Fall into German. She took it on, not realizing the difficulties involved in a literary translation as compared to the texts assigned at the Dolmetscher-Institut. It took the pair weeks to arrive at a version that satisfied them. It was at that point that Top would ask Beckett for a meeting to read him a translation. From then on, Beckett was to give Erika his English texts to translate, other radio plays to begin with, thereby launching her career as a translator of literature (12-15).The Tophovens met with Beckett in his apartment on the rue des Favorites until he moved to a larger place on boulevard Saint-Jacques in 1960. …

In the early spring of 1985 Michael Colgan, the artistic director of the Gate Theatre in Dublin, asked the actor Barry McGovern if he would be willing to undertake a one-man show based on the work of Samuel Beckett. Barry, who had already played in a number of Beckett's plays for stage and radio, was more than willing. Michael Colgan intimated to Barry that the script for Beginning to End, derived from the body of his own work by Beckett for the actor Jacky MacGowran, would be available. MacGowran had toured that show to Dublin in the late sixties and had recorded an audio version for Claddagh Records in Dublin and, additionally, a video version for RTE, the national broadcaster in Ireland. Barry was tempted but finally reluctant to undertake a revival of that show because it had been so wonderfully "inhabited" by MacGowran.Nothing happened for a while until Barry and I were introduced to each other and discovered we shared a common passion for Beckett's work. Barry asked whether I would be interested in jointly assembling an actable script from that work. I was, indeed. We decided to re-read the entire canon and then come to a decision. This was arrived at fairly quickly-the source for the script was to be Beckett's so-called trilogy of post-war novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable.We then met with Michael Colgan as producer who provided us with a theatrical template-the show was to be a late-night, one-man show in two acts the first of which was to be 50/55 minutes long and the second no more than 45 minutes. There we were then, the ocean of Beckett's incomparable prose before us and two thimbles in our hands, one slightly smaller than the other.The script achieved its final form by early July and premiered, under the direction of Colm O Briain, at the the Gate Theatre for the Dublin Theatre Festival in late September. The show was an immediate critical and commercial success and, very soon thereafter, set out on a touring schedule which has brought and continues to bring Barry McGovern to many places. Soon after the opening when Michael Colgan asked me to specify what I wanted for my work on the script my answer was simple: a return ticket to Paris and a meeting with Samuel Beckett.I'll Go On toured to Paris in April 1986 for the week-long celebrations to mark Beckett's eightieth birthday. He sent a telegram to the company on the opening night to say he was with us "in spirit" but would not attend a performance. The next day Michael Colgan advised me to be outside my hotel on Sunday morning (April 27) at ten o'clock and to be ready for "an important rendezvous." A taxi brought four of us (Michael, Barry, the late Rupert Murray-the lighting designer for I'll Go On-and me) to the plm hotel on the boulevard Saint-Jacques where we trooped in to the Petit Cafe to await the arrival of Beckett. Though I felt like Moses must have felt as he approached the burning bush I still had enough presence of mind to arrange the chairs so that Beckett's would be directly opposite mine. If my tongue deserted me, my eyes and ears would still function normally. He appeared punctually at 11 o'clock, greeted each of us with great courtesy and we all sat down around a small table for coffee and conversation. There was no formality, just easy talk among friends. The talk was of Dublin, winners of the Epsom Derby, Croker's Acres, the vicissitudes of theatre touring, the vocal capacities of parrots, the fuss of birthdays, the vestigial significations of anglicised Irish placenames.Beckett was interested in hearing about our short run in Paris as he had been fully apprised of the quality of our work by his Dublin informants. He went on to tell us of difficulties encountered the previous month by Billie Whitelaw who was touring his Footfalls and Rockaby in Australia. She was playing in a studio theatre in Melbourne and, simultaneously, a play about the Vietnam war with a raucous soundtrack of Bruce Springsteen's music was playing on the main stage and was clearly audible in the studio. …

A number of critics have noted the shift in Beckett's prose writing after the trilogy. It becomes shorter, less narrative and approximates poetry. Porter Abbott has proposed that Beckett's art in Texts for Nothing and How It Is is "post-narrative" (106), and Ruby Cohn describes the late short prose as "lyrics of fiction" (1973, 220-69). Stanley Gontarski touches on both of these suggestions in his introduction to the complete short prose:Beckett's stories have [...] often been treated as anomalous or aberrant, a species so alien to the tradition of the short fiction that critics are still struggling to assess not only what they mean - if indeed they "mean" at all - but what they are: stories or novels, prose or poetry, rejected fragments or completed tales. [...] Much of Beckett's short prose inhabits the margins between prose and poetry, between narrative and drama, and finally between completion and incompletion.(xi-xii)"One Evening" epitomises these classificatory struggles. It starts out as a story, but it does not develop in any narrative direction. It is written in prose, but it employs a number of features we expect to find in poetry. It is published as an autonomous, completed text, but it appears fragmentary and incomplete. The fact that it originates from a draft version of the canonised Ill Seen III Said (Krance, 200) might lead one to perceive it as a fragment, but that would be to disregard its autonomous status.1 It has very rarely been subjected to close analytical scrutiny. In fact, I have only come across a few interpretations (by Cohn 2001, 35859; Krance, xx; Santilli, 177-78; Van Hulle 2009, ix-x), all of which are little more than a page or so long. However, "One Evening's" intricate composition and the major themes and stylistic features of Beckett's late art that it comprises call for consideration of this prose piece in its own right. In this article, I engage in an extensive close reading of "One Evening." First, it is argued that the narrative is truncated or blocked and that this shifts the focus onto the narrator's act. The stasis then gives way to a discussion of the narrator's employment of poetic features in relation to "One Evening's" themes and symbols. Finally, the text's dominant theme of human mortality is shown to trigger meditation on religion and nothingness and to entail a liminal existence in which the moment seems to freeze, but ending is deferred. What we are left with is a "tableau vivant," as it is termed in the text (line 50), or an anthropomorphic still life.'Plot' and the Narrating Act"One Evening" consists of one long paragraph of fifty-four lines (Beckett 1995, 253-54).2 As Ruby Cohn asserts, "To call Un soir a short story is to highlight its slight narrative content" (2001, 358). Basically you can summarise the narrative content and information as follows: An old widow, straying in a field in search of yellow flowers for her deceased husband's grave, stumbles on a man lying on the ground. This singular event is told more than once, and both the extent and the order of the details provided vary. The narrative situation is a complicated one. At a basic level, the narrator is heterodiegetic (i.e., not a character in the story world), but the focalization oscillates between being internal and external. In some sections of the text, the narrator's voice predominates, leaving us without access to the woman's psychology; in other sections, however, the woman's thoughts eclipse the narrator's presence. This oscillation between the two extremes has to do with the degree of distance or contiguity between the narrative voice and the woman's obscure and unstable psychology. The single paragraph of the text can be roughly divided into the following six sequences: (1) lines 1-5 present the encounter; (2) 5-12 provide a description of the man; (3) in 12-17 the narrator describes the woman in greater detail and gives a glimpse of her inner thoughts; (4) 18-27 again freezes the moment of the encounter that opened the text; (5) in 28-47 an inner point of view of the woman is narrated, focussing on the time just before she stumbles on the body; (6) 47-54 again focuses on the frozen image of the encounter. …

In his country the problem - no, I can't do it.Beckett, Malone DiesOn 15 February 1954 the editor and translator Hans Naumann wrote to Beckett expressing his admiration for Molloy (1951), before broaching a subject that has frequently provided an effective point of departure in the recent re-evaluation of Beckett's writings within an Irish context: "would it be right to try to find in your work the presence of an Irish tradition [?]" Beckett's response aptly illustrates his simultaneous engagement with and disengagement from this tradition. Two days later, he appeared to circumvent Naumann's enquiry, insisting "On Ireland [...] it is utterly impossible for me to speak with moderation," whilst concurrently invoking the central image of W. B. Yeats's play At the Hawk's Well (1918): "I had no need to drink at the magic fountain to be able to bear living outside it" (2011, 465). This evasion, then, seems more paraliptic than elliptical, for although both rhetorical terms share the same etymological root (Gk. leipo [to leave behind]), the former sidesteps a given element, whereas the latter passes it by without mention.1 To sidestep an obstacle is, of course, not merely to evade it, but to acknowledge and evade it; furthermore, when Malone turns to the economic deliberations of Saposcat in Malone Dies (1956), his narrative constitutes a similarly apophastic discourse, since it refers to, whilst claiming not to refer to, the matter in hand. Introducing Sapo's reflections on "the market," Malone promises further details, but ultimately musters less than twenty words upon the subject as he stammers through a series of aporetic sentences: "In his country the problem - no, I can't do it. The peasants. His visits to. I can't" (2010a, 21). The French text, however, obliquely intimates that this passage represents more than just a deliberate eschewal of what, in his 1945 review of Thomas MacGreevy's monograph on Jack B. Yeats, Beckett termed the "local substance" (1983, 97), as Malone stipulates that this national dilemma relates to "le plan alimentaire" (the food plan; 1951b, 35; my translation).This juxtaposition of the economic and the alimentary is a vestigial trace of the trilogy's evolution, for it gestures towards a thirteen-page scatological passage in the third of four "Molloy" notebooks, a passage that savagely parodies the economic protecttionism adopted by Fianna Fail during the Anglo-Irish Economic War of the 1930s. This passage might productively be read both alongside Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) and against the Protestant, bourgeois interpretation of the economic writings of Swift and Bishop Berkeley in Ireland during the 1930s, which Beckett encountered in Joseph Hone and Mario M. Rossi's Bishop Berkeley: His Life, Writings and Philosophy (1931) and Swift: or, The Egotist (1934). Nevertheless, the more immediate context of Beckett's depiction of the prosperity of Ballyba was the material deprivation of post-war France, which he described in the non-fictional broadcast "The Capital of the Ruins" (1946). Perhaps more significant than a recognition of either of these historical contexts, however, is the extent to which the elision of this satirical passage functions as an index of a paraliptic politics. For if, as Peter Boxall argues, Beckett's "negativity is bound up with a stubbornly residual referentiality" (163), a paraliptic politics would denote a compositional process governed by a play of centripetal and centrifugal forces, wherein a movement towards the political induces a subsequent retreat, as the inscription of an overtly political writing occasions its own effacement.Beckett, Ariosto and SwiftRead in conjunction with Beckett's critical writings, this scatological passage occupies a peculiar position, for Beckett clearly articulates an aversion to satire in a review of Jack B. Yeats's The Amaranthers (1936), a review which lauds Yeats's novel for its divergence from Gulliver's Travels: "There is no satire. …

Samuel Beckett culled his trilogy of novels for striking images and phrases throughout his later career, but during the 1950s he revisited Molloy, Malone meurt and L'Innommable in a more direct sense, when various parties requested English versions of his new work. What Beckett called "the losing battle" of translating the trilogy (Knowlson, 438) was fought in the period between 1950 and 1958. This article discusses Molloy because it forced Beckett to devise a long-term strategy to deal with the "hopeless thankless chore" of translation (Harmon, 355), while also leaving sufficient room for new creative endeavours. His decision from Malone Dies onwards to self-translate most of his work was largely the result of a troublesome collaboration on Molloy with Patrick Bowles, a young South African writer.Until recently, little was known about this joining of forces. Bowles's article in the P.N. Review (1994) and James Knowlson's impressive authorized biography (1996) have outlined the basic facts, but the second volume of Samuel Beckett's letters (2011) and Richard Seaver's memoirs (2012), as well as information available in archives, offer new information that calls for a critical reassessment of both the text and the process through which it came about. The present article offers a first step in that direction, by approaching the English Molloy from the perspective of "letters, notebooks, manuscripts and the like," also known as Beckett's "grey canon" (Gontarski, 143). Our purpose is to shed more light on a relatively obscure period in Beckett's literary career and to chart the textual history of Molloy in English. To this purpose, an overview of the translation's preserved draft stages seems in order:AAs the chronological overview reveals, the textual history of Molloy in English does not begin with the Beckett-Bowles collaboration. The idea to translate the novel was already on Beckett's mind in the late 1940s, six months after its completion in French, but well before it found a publisher. George Reavey wrote to him in Dublin that Cyril Connolly was looking for a text of around 30,000 words to include in Horizon, but the plan never materialized. On 8 July 1948 Beckett replied that he would not be able to translate the first part of Molloy by that time (Bair, 402). Two years later the first English sample from Molloy appeared in the October 1950 issue of Transition, together with a specimen from Malone Dies. Again, the French novels had yet to appear, but Jerome Lindon of Les Editions de Minuit had by now accepted them. The fragments are identified not by their titles but the numbers "I" and "II." The ensemble is called "Two Fragments" and Beckett is credited as the author and translator. Shane Weller's recent Faber edition of Molloy discusses the "substantive differences" between the Transition specimen and the Grove/Olympia editions (qtd. in Beckett 2009, vii).Equally interesting is Beckett's selection of text, beginning: "I left the shelter of the doorway and began to lever myself forward, slowly swinging through the sullen air" (1950, 103). In the Minuit first edition, this is when Molloy sets out on his crutches: "Ce qui par contre me parait indeniable, c'est que, vaincu par l'evidence, par une tres forte probabilite plutot, je sortis de sous l'auvent et me mis a me balancer lentement en avant, a travers les airs" (1951, 97). The English rendition in Transition deletes the first part of the French sentence, to pick up pace in full syntactic swing. Molloy embarks on a series of ruminations that comes to a peculiar close: "And the cycle continues, joltingly, of flight and bivouac, in an Egypt without bounds, without infant, without mother" (1950, 105).Beckett worked on the fragment between June and September 1950, when paying a sustained visit to his mother in Ireland (Cohn, 193). May Beckett was suffering from Parkinson's disease and eventually passed away on 25 August (Knowlson, 383). These biographical circumstances imbue the phrase "without mother" with special significance. …

Editorial NoteOne or more of Beckett's three novels appear in a great many pieces of literary or cultural criticism. The remit for the bibliography was to be as comprehensive as possible for publications since Raymond Federman and John Fletcher's Samuel Beckett: His Works and His Critics: An Essay in Bibliography (Berkeley: U of California P, 1970). At the same time, to cite every piece in which Molloy, Malone Dies or The Unnamable is given at least a paragraph would have been unworkable. Some of the selective principles are as follows:Only articles, essays, chapters or books which take one or more of the three novels as a primary focus are included. Pieces which use Beckett's text(s) principally for a point of comparison are not included. By contrast, pieces which focus on readings of the Beckett text(s) by other writers (for example, by Bataille, Blanchot, Coetzee) are included. Likewise, pieces which focus on allusions in Beckett's text(s) are included. Translations of essays by French writers have not been included. Monographs on Beckett are included where they give sustained attention to any or all of the three novels. Page ranges for these are not included because they could not be registered consistently: a number of the books cited here have chapters or distinct sections on pieces from the trilogy, but others bring them back at different points. Monographs not exclusively focused on Beckett are included (under 'Other Monographs') where they contain at least one chapter that gives sustained attention to any or all of the three novels. Page ranges for these are included. The bibliography includes works published between 1970 and 2013. It is non-evaluative in the sense that no judgments about the relative quality of the work have been factored into selection; at the same time, it has entailed 'aesthetic' judgments regarding the degree of sustained attention given by a monograph, essay or article.Two or three examples to clarify 'primary focus': A piece which has something very interesting to say about the three novels but which does not have a 'primary focus' on them is Rolf Breuer's "Paradox in Beckett," in Modern Language Review 88.3 (1993), 559-80. Though it gives attention to each of the three novels - a paragraph or two each - its emphasis is on the oeuvre. Essays of this kind, whose focus is on the oeuvre, have generally not been included. The dividing line in these cases has inevitably not always been absolutely certain. By way of contrast, James Meriwether's "Towards a Contemporary Theoretical Structure" takes the three novels as its single case study and model for the wider discussion. Martha Nussbaum's "Narrative Emotions," similarly, is organised around the trilogy. Such essays are included.A database of the entries printed has been compiled and includes some further information, such as whether a piece focuses primarily on Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable or a combination of the three. Again, the divisions are not always clear-cut. For reasons of consistency the additional details are not printed here. However, the database can be considered a working document that may be refined and made available for scholars at a future date. There will have been oversights as well as intentional omissions in this bibliography; information on these communicated via the editors of SBT/A would be most welcome. My hope is that the bibliography will help those preparing new work on the three novels to see what has come before, as a basis for avoiding oversights of their own, and as a reference guide that gives a picture of how the field has been.Articles and EssaysAbbott, H. Porter, "A Grammar for Being Elsewhere," in Journal of Modern Literature 6.1 (1977), 39-46.-, "The Harpooned Notebook: Malone Dies and the Conventions of Intercalated Narrative," in Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives, ed. Morris Beja, S. E. Gontarski, and Pierre Astier (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1983), 71-79. …

The AuthorStories of the trilogy's author have been told with increasing accuracy and subtlety over recent years, thanks largely to the historicizing, archival turn in Beckett scholarship, which is currently coinciding with the publication of Beckett's selected letters. If Molloy, Malone meurt / Malone Dies and L'Innommable / The Unnamable might be considered to be the central novels, both literally and figuratively, of Beckett's oeuvre, then one question to be asked is the following: is it not perhaps a little strange that, albeit with significant caveats, these novels do not figure as centrally in the criticism of recent years as their positions of esteem might lead us to expect? This is one way of asking 'why now,' that is by posing these novels as a challenge to contemporary scholarship, a challenge which implies a 'whither now'; a selfreflection enabling a look towards the future. Discussions are already taking place in which current - and by implication future - scholarship on Beckett might be queried and shifted. Conferences in Australia in 2012 and Canada in 2013 have sought to cross the divides which have typically separated methodological schools from one another; to show to the historicists that philosophically-informed modes of reading can themselves be historical, for example, and to show to the theorists that retrieving material from archives might then inform how the works can be read anew. In Sydney the attempt was made to look 'Beyond Historicism,' a beyond which uses contemporary critical-theoretical and philosophical tools, in a conference that also sought to place Molloy, Malone meurt / Malone Dies and L'Innommable / The Unnamable as central to such a debate. In Halifax the 'Samuel Beckett: Form and History' conference was "particularly interested in how historical analysis might address the formal complexities of Beckett's work." The editors of and contributors to the current volume are, therefore, far from being the only scholars addressing questions of Beckett's major middle-period novels in the context of the broader critical reception of these works.The long-running project to publish selections of Beckett's correspondence has recently released letters from 1941 to 1956. While these are also years of so much more (the War, burgeoning fame via the turn to drama and Godot and dialogues with Georges Duthuit), they are also the years of Molloy, Malone meurt / Malone Dies and L'Innommable / The Unnamable. Much, therefore, surely remains to be said about these novels, particularly of their geneses and reception, even if many of the letters which mention these novels serve to fill out what are familiar ideas of Beckett's creative exhaustion at the end of this prosaic journey. For example, in April 1951 he informed Jerome Lindon that for good or ill it was L'Innommable he was most attached to, that he was trying to write something new to get out of that novel's shadow, explaining "quoi'qu'il m'ait mis dans de sales draps. J'essaie de m'en sortir. Mais je ne m'en sors pas" ("it has left me in a sorry state. I'm trying to get over it. But I am not getting over it"; 10 April 1951, 2011, 234). The following year he told Aidan Higgins that this same novel "seems about the end of the jaunt as far as I am concerned, there being nobody left to utter and, independently perhaps, certainly superfluously, nothing left to utter about" (8 February 1951; 2011, 319). However, even while noting that it is endings and exhaustions Beckett often focuses upon when discussing these novels, it is also worth bringing up the other bucket in this well. With a few more years distance between him and the novels Beckett would remember something more positive when writing to Barbara Bray in 1958, while thanking her for help with corrections to The Unnamable's translation:I am very touched by what you say of the U. I wish I could think it is important as you say, but of course I can't. I am in acute crisis about my work (on the lines familiar to you by now) and have decided that I not merely can't but won't go on as I have been going more or less ever since the Textes pour Rien and must either get back to nothing again and the bottom of all the hills again like before Molloy or else call it a day. …

1. Introduction: A Cognitive JourneyIt is fairly odd discovering, in a letter to Georges Duthuit at the very beginning of June 1949 - only two months after having started to draft The Unnamable, in one of the gloomiest periods of his creative career - that Beckett was "reading Around the World in 80 Days," positively classified as "lively stuff" (LSB II, 163). Given the descending, excavating nature of the last novel of the trilogy, it would have been less surprising to find a mention of the equally famous masterpiece by Verne, the Voyage au centre de la Terre (1864). Yet, in a less local scrutiny, both the horizontal, superficial (and significantly circular) orbit of Phileas Fogg's enterprise, and the vertical, geologically stratified axis of Professor Lidenbrok's quest are present in Beckett's narrative work. However, these two movements are not simultaneously operative, but rather are subsequently exploited throughout Beckett's narrative trajectory. As Mark Nixon elucidates, sometime after Murphy there is a turning point in how the trope of the journey is treated in Beckett's fiction, since Beckett has accepted "that there was no 'to' or 'towards', and thus no redemptive destination" (191). The horizontal pointless excursions of Belacqua across Irish cityscapes or Murphy's wandering in the outer world of London progressively come to an end in the trilogy - passing, as Shane Weller argues, from the "object-world or subject-world" of Murphy to the "flight from all world" in Malone meurt (Weller, 109). This is not to say that the trope of the journey disappears from Beckett's literary imagination. Rather, as Nixon indicates, it "remains central to Beckett's postwar work, but is negated" (97) or, I would suggest, inverted (The Unnamable being "a kind of inverted spiral," (Beckett 2009, 310)). The horizontal plane of movement is replaced by a vertical expedition, and Belacqua's "gression" (Beckett 2010, 33) is substituted by an inward plunge, of which The Unnamable constitutes the endless bottom. In this narrative manoeuvre, a different 'towardness' emerges, for Beckett understands, as we shall see, that the outward journey in search of the self is the "wrong figure" (qtd. in Knowlson, 247). An alternative exploration has to be directed on the way to what he calls the "seed of motion" (247) by going beyond what is called in Molloy "the surface leaden above the infernal depths" (Beckett 2009, 73) of the mind from which the illusion of selfhood stems.In the present article, I want to account for this second speleological journey in Beckett's fictional work by drawing on contemporary cognitive theories of self.1 On the one hand, I want to suggest that, in The Unnamable, Beckett does indeed reach some kind of centre of the subjective planet, the structure and functions of which resemble those qualities that the philosopher of mind Daniel Dennett attributes to what he calls the "center of narrative gravity" (1991, 418). This parallel should enrich the interpretation of the outcome of this expedition, with the discovery that the feeling of a seed of (narrative) motion is a false sensory impression responsible for the "stupid obsession with depth" (Beckett 2009, 287), which in turn accounts for the conception and perception of the self as an internal locus of subjectivity. Furthermore, I put this narrative account of the self into relation with two distinct problems related to self-consciousness: namely, the problems of circularity and of infinite regress. As we shall see, The Unnamable can be read as a fictional rendering of these two complications indissolubly bounded to an ontology of self-knowledge. On the other hand, I elaborate on the remarkable similarities between the three-levels model of self proposed by the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio (2010), and the distinct cognitive levels that the narrator of The Unnamable lets the reader perceive, especially by pointing beyond its linguistic existence. In a letter to Aidan Higgins in 1952, Beckett wrote about The Unnamable as "the end of the jaunt," going further by saying that "I used to think all [t]his work was an effort, necessarily feeble, to express the nothing. …

It is an often told story: the period of modernism corresponds to an exhaustion of nineteenth-century models of narrative development, temporal progression, and historical continuity. In contradistinction to such models, modernism in literature and culture more generally has been associated with temporal interruption, immobilization, or spatial form. As exemplary of this tendency of modernist culture, one might cite Stephane Mallarme's Preface to "Un Coup de des" (1895), which states "Everything happens by a shortcut, hypothetically; storytelling [le recit] is avoided" (105), or Walter Benjamin's unfinished Arcades Project: "history decays into images, not into stories" (476). Developing from this broad picture, critical descriptions of the novel in this period see modernist fiction as marking the obsolescence of nineteenth-century developmental forms, most prominently the Bildungsroman,1 and accounts of Beckett's fiction have echoed this alignment of literary modernism. In Samuel Beckett and the Postcolonial Novel, Patrick Bixby writes, "Beckett rewrites the plot of the Bildungsroman so that narrative is directed less toward successful individual development and social assimilation than toward the cancellation of these terms, which are written even further into dissolution and disintegration" (8).2Jed Esty has recently provided a critical counter-narrative, arguing that modernist fiction, and in particular the modernist "meta- bildungsroman," develops a critical perspective on nineteenth-century developmental thought and its literary forms, even as it retains elements of them: "one way to conceptualize the historical specificity of modernism itself, in fact, is to locate it at the dialectical switchpoint between residual nineteenth-century narratives of global development and emergent twentieth-century critiques of universalist and evolutionary thought" (35). This intervention usefully places on the critical agenda the question of how to account for modernism's ongoing engagement with diachronic forms, departing from (or calling for a more nuanced account of) the critical narrative of modernism as antidevelopmental, or invested in spatial or imagistic models. But a lingering problem here is the motivation for modernist fiction's involvement with this strand of nineteenth-century thought. Esty's principal response to this question is that the ideology of developmental historicism retains its purchase more generally in culture, economics, and politics, and the modernist anti-developmental metabildungsroman registers this situation. One danger here, however, is the reduction of inherited developmental forms to the status of ideology or false consciousness.3An alternative approach is to foreground that such forms are not just ideological, but also involve normative or emancipatory impulses, both in their nineteenth-century and modernist versions, and this move opens up another avenue to address the problem of why developmental paradigms retain their currency for modernism. Pursuing this line of thought, the central claim in the following reading of Beckett and Theodor Adorno is that modernist narrative might be construed as ambiguously perpetuating normative impulses that structure nineteenthcentury developmental thought and the novel form - for an accommodation between the subjective organization of experience and the boundlessness of capitalist modernity, between meaningful forms and modernity's denial of such forms. To say this much is not to make a claim for a stable mechanism of subject formation, or to presume a critical autonomy or distance for cultural forms. Rather, an underlying proposition of my discussion is that the literary reflections of Beckett and Adorno proceed through the reification, or what Adorno calls "neutralization," of cultural forms. For this strain of modernism, the possibility of aesthetic autonomy and critical distance becomes a problem inscribed within the language and interpretive dilemmas of these texts. …

my sane and ordinary inner speech is itself likely to be a swarm of quotations, often from anonymous and vanished others. The dead chatter away as the inner speech of the living.Jean-Jacques Lecercle and Denise Riley, The Force of LanguageAll the dead voices.Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot^What follows is not an attempt to avoid or plug the "epistemological vortex" of The Unnamable (Connor 2010, xix-xx), but to think about mediumship's role in forming this vortex. Voices are extremely important in the trilogy - indeed, C. J. Ackerley suggests that the "mystery of the voice" may be Beckett's "most profound literary creation" (40) - and these acousmatic and disembodied voices often defy explanation. Yet, there are numerous references to voices in Beckett's work that could be interpreted as forms of mediumistic channelling (that is, when a person channels the voice of the dead), such as in the late television play Eh Joe. I want to suggest that this later exploration of mediumship is already present in a more obscured, vague, and spectral form in the trilogy. Peter Fifield has analysed references to voices that persist after death, specifically the protagonists of The Unnamable, Malone Dies and "The Calmative," in terms of Cotard's syndrome; as a supplement to this insightful neuropsychological analysis, I want to suggest that mediumship might also offer an appropriate frame for Beckett's use of the voice in these texts. Beckett was interested in the possibility that strange, unknown, foreign voices might end up in one's brain; the trilogy is testament to this enduring fascination.Numerous critics have linked writing to occultism, with varying degrees of playfulness. In "The Death of the Author," Roland Barthes suggests that writing itself begins when "the voice loses its origin [and] the author enters his own death" (49). Although Barthes doesn't push this metaphor, it skirts close to what we might term the au dela - literally the beyond, the land of the dead. Beckett is quite willing, where Barthes is not, to engage with these occult associations. Beyond Barthes, Nicholas Royle's Telepathy and Literature has suggested that literature and telepathy are deeply interdependent. As Pamela Thurschwell puts it, the telepathic question par excellence is: whose thoughts are these, inhabiting my inner world (125)? This a question The Unnamable asks with frantic urgency. Telepathy shares with mediumship an inexplicable transference of knowledge and voices, but of the living rather than the dead - and the transferred content often remains internal rather than being externally channelled or performed through the voice or automatic writing. Leon Surette has compellingly argued that occultism had an important influence on modernism, suggesting that Ezra Pound read T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) as a text which shared certain traits (its seemingly random jumps in time and space as well as across multiple disembodied voices) with seances (69). But the most prominent modernist with an interest in mediumship is W. B. Yeats, as evidenced in The Words Upon the Window Pane (1934).Beckett's voices raise many issues, as critics have long been aware. As Wilma Siccama observes: "Beckett's characters hardly ever speak 'themselves': voices come to them, or they say it as they hear it" (175). Anthony Cordingley adds that: "the narrators and characters of Beckett's novels are increasingly haunted by the sense that their voices are the legacy of not only 'their' past selves/characters in earlier works by Samuel Beckett, but also of an estranged voice or voices inside them" (135). Extending the trope to the author himself, Siccama suggests that "Beckett does not 'speak' with his own voice: he is more like a medium, a receiver and transmitter of another voice, one that he hears in his head" (186). Although this is a rather unusual proposal, numerous interviews suggest that Beckett consciously invoked the trope of mysterious voices when discussing his compositional process. …

"My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended)," Beckett claimed to Alan Schneider on 29 December 1957 (Harmon, 23). It is a striking remark, one that has long since piqued the interest of scholars working in Beckett studies. More widely, many readers of Beckett will undoubtedly associate this remark with Beckett's 'radiogenic writings,' specifically All That Fall (first broadcast on the BBC's Third Programme on 13 January 1957), followed by Embers (24 June 1959; also winner of the 1959 Italia Prize), Words and Music (7 December 1962) and Cascando (6 October 1964). Most likely during the early 1960s, Beckett also composed the radiogenic 'Roughs' - Rough for Radio II (first broadcast 13 April 1976) and the long unrecorded Rough for Radio I (first broadcast by RTE Ireland on 12 April 2006) - alongside translating Robert Pinget's La Manivelle for the Third Programme's broadcast on 23 August 1960 (with the Anglophone title The Old Tune).1 Accordingly, several key scholarly works have treated these productions as a complete radio corpus. Thus, Beckett's well-known remark to Schneider might be read via his engagement with the Third Programme at this time. Yet as this article emphasises, quite literally, that is not the half of it.A second and more general context around the mid- to late-1950s witnesses something of a critical consensus in Beckett studies, one shared by all three of his main biographies. Beckett's famous 'siege in the room' between roughly 1945 and 1950 - in which he wrote two plays and four novels (the latter, most relevant here, including the 'trilogy' of Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable), several poems and nearly 20 short stories - led to a kind of "creative impasse," in Anthony Cronin's words, even if, at this time, he was on the verge of "new relationships, interests and excitements" (458, 474). Indeed, one of these newfound interests was radio work, as James Knowlson's biography stresses:Beckett's depression was very slow to lift, as he began to experience renewed doubt as to whether there was any way out of the impasse into which The Unnamable and Fin de partie had led him. The medium of radio, with the challenge of its technical constraints, offered one possible escape route. Donald McWhinnie indeed wrote: 'My impression is that if he is to write at all in the near future it will be for radio, which has captured his imagination.'(431)Similarly, Deirdre Bair has extended this "depression at not being able to write prose" to early 1958; that is, with Beckett struggling to complete the English translation of The Unnamable (519). However, claims Bair, by the next summer Beckett's lull had dissipated with Comment c'est (How It Is), "which almost demands to be spoken, in order to savour the full flavor of the language." (555) Underscoring this point in a splendid 1987 essay, Robert Wilcher opens his "'Out of the Dark': Beckett's Texts for Radio" by declaring: "Samuel Beckett's encounter with the medium of radio drama between 1956 and about 1962 has been recognized as an episode of some significance in his development as a writer" (1).From the above, very different perspectives - to some extent underwritten by Beckett's December 1957 characterisation of his work as "fundamental sounds" - a rudimentary picture thus emerges in these pivotal years. It is one of an avant-garde author, having written himself into a creative corner, slowly emerges with a new form of expression by the early 1960s: abstract, aural and disembodied. If broadly accurate, then writing for radio played no small role in the development of Beckett's later works. More specifically, it may be that working with the Third Programme at this time inspired Beckett to write radiogenically - even for works not originally written for radio, like How It Is - in the remaining three decades of his creative output. In this light, Beckett's collaboration with the BBC can be seen as little short of transformative. …

Many facets of the trilogy appeal to, and reframe, the conventions of the detective novel (Spraggins; Dearlove, 40; Kenner, 32, 35). This line of enquiry, salient in critical appraisals of Molloy, has also yielded precious insights into Beckett's early fiction; recently, Frederik Smith has read Watt as subverting the syllogistic thinking developed in Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novels, familiar to Beckett since his childhood. It is clear that Beckett was a keen and knowledgeable reader of detective fiction: especially during the early 1950s, "Agatha Christie whodunnits" in English and French were readings of choice, and Beckett's interest in thrillers by Christie, Edgar Wallace, Erne Stanley Garner and Rex Stout continued beyond that point (Knowlson, 390, 553, 562). He also kept abreast of the adventurous explorations of the genre published by the Editions de Minuit and manifested interest in Alain Robbe-Grillet's adaptation of the detective plot in Les Gommes (1953) (Moorjani, 232). His correspondence suggests that the writing of Malone meurt remained circumscribed by a literary universe populated by detectives, spies and mysteries awaiting resolution: writing to Georges Duthuit in 1951, Beckett deplores his inability to read popular crime novels as a measure of the taxing demands made upon his creative energies by the completion of Malone meurt and Textes pour rien. Not only is he unable to write, but he cannot even read "policier[s]" - the paperback detective novels and thrillers he was so fond of (Beckett 2011, 231).The cultural and political imaginary that fuels Beckett's post-war work remains powerfully inflected by the premises of detective fiction, as evidenced in the quest of the private investigator Camier, Moran's search for Molloy, and the humble investigations underlying Malone's stories. Beckett initially perceived these three inquests as part of the same series (2011, 80). But the detective plot is reduced to its bare bones in Malone Dies: this is, indeed, a deeply precarious context for deductive thinking, and Malone's searches, accounts and deductions, although modest in their remit, require relentless labour; even the reliability and existence of a pencil are subject to speculation. Malone tries to preclude material or linguistic imprecisions such as those that might emerge from inappropriate reasoning methods; he aspires to the arrangement of his belongings, the "unique occasion" for "a true statement at last," "to be free from all trace of approximativeness," yet acknowledges that, unlike his own, "true lives do not tolerate this excess of circumstance" (196-97). However, enigmas are too numerous to find resolution: the narrative is littered with allusions to mysterious disappearances and conspiracies masterminded by unnamed powers and institutions, which, in turn, frame the attempts of Malone and his creatures to find, identify and connect material traces, sequences of events and explainable causes.This essay examines the degree to which forms of deduction in Malone Dies are politically and historically grounded; I contend that, through its critique of the forms of determinism, concealment and normalisation upon which the exercise of deduction relies, the novel also engages post-war debates about the roles and responsibilities of state institutions. To analyse the strained relation that Malone Dies maintains to the conventions of detective fiction, as I seek to do here, is also to trace the residual bearing of specific social and political circumstances upon the novel's evocations of disappearances, deaths, searches and inquests. This reading runs against the grain of established interpretations of Malone Dies as a subtle reflection on ontology, according to the terms defined by its first lines; here, I focus on a historically-inflected text concerned about state-sanctioned persecution, whose borrowings from the discourses of detective fiction remain underpinned by the momentous debates about collaborationism and the dehiscence of the French State that are formative of its genesis as a French-language novel in 1947 (these debates, as Andrew Gibson has shown, also inform some facets of Mercier et Camier, written in 1946 (Gibson, 19-26)). …

That Beckett read widely in La Sainte Bible is evidenced by a quotation (recorded in the Whoroscope Notebook) of a verse the incongruity of which had clearly caught his eye: "Circoncisez donc le prepuce de votre coeur, et ne roidissez plus votre cou" (UoR MS 3000, 63v); or, as the King James Authorised Version puts it: "Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no more stiff-necked" (qtd. in Ackerley and Gontarski 2004, 51).1 One quality of this remarkable image is that it is contextually rather than linguistically bound, as it may be translated (from Hebrew to Latin to French to English) without losing its essential metaphorical force. This is not often the case with metaphors and quotations, biblical or otherwise; and, as a consequence of such inevitable linguistic differance, their authority within L'Innommable may assume different intonations in the English 'translation' of The Unnamable.I have placed 'translation' in quotation marks because the English versions of Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, three novels that together constitute a trilogy (however much Beckett disliked that word), have a complex ontology, with respect to which this paper assumes some simple premises, none of which are meant to be contentious:1. one reason that Beckett chose to write in French was to divest himself, to some degree, of the impedimenta that would have been otherwise the inevitable consequence of his using the language of Shakespeare, Joyce and the King James Bible (elements of which sneak back into his English rewritings).2. when Beckett wrote first in English and then in French, the result is generally (I do not wish to be too insistent) a translation; but when he wrote first in French and re-composed in English the works thus generated are not translations in the usual senses of that word, but are better defined as bilingual texts.3. a genuinely bilingual text is rare, with an unusual ontology: it is not a pseudo-coupling but a structure in which each version while sufficient unto itself is yet part of a greater whole. In the Three Novels, this defines not only the bond between the French and English texts, but also the relationship of each individual text to the other two (or possibly five) in the sequence.4. Beckett, for all his anguished disbelief, is a major religious writer, and his greatest works are saturated in religious echoes, none more so than The Unnamable.In Beckett's early works, such echoes are often ostentatious; their intention is broadly literary, philosophical or ironic, and they delight in their witty irreverence. Thus, Dream of Fair to middling Women, Murphy and Watt, or poems such as "Hell Crane to Starling" and "Casket of Pralinen for a Daughter of a Dissipated Mandarin," are full of arcane phrases that signal allusive intention and call for exegesis, much of it biblical; but few would call them major religious texts (Watt is perhaps the exception). However, the bilingual works of Beckett's middle period (the Three Novels, Texts for Nothing, Waiting for Godot, Endgame and How It Is) are equally, if less obviously, replete with biblical allusion and together constitute perhaps the most important body of secular religious writing (the paradox is intended) from the past century. Beckett's conclusion, like that of the narrator of How It Is, might be that it is "all balls"; but the questioning is relentlessly theological, and Christianity is more than the convenient mythology that he was wont to dismiss it as. In particular, the Bible (usually the Authorised Version) is a constant point of reference and authority, even if that authority is questioned and mocked as much as it is observed.2Like other literary references and rhetorical effects, biblical echoes become fewer and fainter in Beckett's later works, as memory replaces allusion and words of religious import fade to residua, ill said, ill heard. Yet even in these attenuated texts they may be discerned. …

This article aims to demonstrate how Samuel Beckett's work for radio was produced within a very particular context: as part of the cultural experiment in radio broadcasting undertaken by the Third Programme, and how there were concerted efforts on the part of the BBC Drama Department to encourage Beckett to write for them, resulting in work he wrote specifically for the radio medium between 1956 and 1962. It also explores responses to Beckett's radio work recorded by Audience Research Reports, discussing them in relation to the processes of listening as regards mass and minority broadcasting.Cet article se propose de montrer que le travail de Beckett pour la radio s'est fait dans un contexte bien particulier. Il a constitue une partie integrante d'une experience culturelle lancee par le Troisieme Programme de la BBC, la redaction du Drama Department deployant tous ses efforts pour encourager Beckett a ecrire pour cette station. Aussi a-t-il contribue avec predilection a leur production entre 1956 et 1962. En meme temps on procede a une analyse des reactions du public que le travail de Beckett a suscitees, pour les situer par rapport au media de la radiodiffusion de masse et a celui de la radiodiffusion pour un public restreint.Beckett was contacted by the BBC in 1956 to discover if he would be interested in writing a play for them. Their interest followed the success of En attendant Godot (1952). The result was All That Fall (written in 1956; first broadcast in 1957),1 which was followed by Embers (written and first broadcast in 1959), Words and Music (written in 1961; first broadcast in 1962), Cascando (written in 1962; first broadcast in 1963 [ORTF]; 1964 [BBC]) and Rough for Radio (written in early 1960s;2 first broadcast in 1976). Thus Beckett's writing for the radio medium took place during the very short time span of six years, yet the plays have been produced and broadcast widely, with repeats by the BBC, and productions in many countries around the world. As recently as 2006 all these radio plays were produced by the Gare St. Lazare Players on Irish radio (RTE Radio One). There are only five plays (six if Rough for Radio I is included), and yet they have an important, if neglected, place in his oeuvre and a considerable significance in relation to his future work for the stage, television and his prose fiction.Beckett's work is eminently suited to the radio medium. Mary Bryden quotes Beckett's words to Andre Bemold: "I have always written for a voice" (32). This focus on the voice, and its all-important corollary - silence - can be traced to his very first published story, "Assumption" (1929). Bryden comments on how "the twin functions of listening and speaking are in Beckett's writing often given more weight as attestors of presence than is the function of seeing" (25). The significance of the voice and the act of listening is clear in work preceding his radio pieces, such as Watt (1953). In the writing that followed his first and subsequent radio work the focus on the voice and the listening activity increased. The tape recorder provided by the BBC for Beckett to listen to All That Fall was his first introduction to this machine, and he heard Patrick McGee's 'cracked voice' in the broadcast readings from the Trilogy - leading directly to Krapp's Last Tape (1958). This play, alongside others, such as the teleplay Eh Joe (1967), and the stage plays Footfalls (1976), That Time (1976) Rockaby (1981) and Ohio Impromptu (1981), places the act of listening as the central focus. The audience watches a figure that listens, and, significantly, listens alongside the figure. In the prose fiction the listening activity is often foregrounded, and in the entry "Voice" in The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett his use of the voice in Company (1980) is discussed in radiophonie terms: "the enigmatic disembodied sound that swells out of the darkness like a radio transmission, for all its paradoxes and ambiguities, for all its irresolutions, is SB's most profound and complex literary creation" (Ackerley and Gontarski, 614). …

Estragon's boots in En attendant Godot harbor a secret that is less 'audible' in its English version. To perceive it, we must follow different threads: a remark made by Beckett to Roger Blin; a commentary by Leslie Hill and one by Dieter Wellershof in their analyses of the writer's work; Beckett's avowed intention in composing the play; and the role given, in both textual and scenic details, to the evocation of the two thieves crucified on Golgotha.11. An Obsession with BootsBeckett who descended from Huguenot emigres (Knowlson 1996, 6) was quite aware of the French origin of his name. In Eleutheria, a character disguised as a spectator jumps upon the stage and, reading the author's name in the program, pronounces it as 'Becquet' (136). Leslie Hill, recalling this incident, questions the "status of names with respect to the texts they surround" (112). He draws attention to the fact that the word bequet or becquet has three senses: "something pasted on to a proof, an overlay," "a male salmon, or a pike," and "the middle sole in a boot, or the hobnail boot itself." He adds a fourth sense for the near homophone becquee, which is "a 'beakful' of food" (Hill, 113).2 Actually, the French word, as found in Harrap 's Standard French and English Dictionary, first published in 1934 and the most likely source for Beckett, is translated, in boot makers' jargon, as 'hobnail.' The boot itself is not designated. Pars pro totol Perhaps because of its tradespecific nature, this meaning is not found in all dictionaries. However, it figures in the Tresor de la langue francaise (1975) under the heading cordonnerie ('shoe making'), and it is the first meaning given in the Grand Larousse encyclopedique (1960). The definition given in French corresponds exactly to the 'hobnail' as defined in The Concise Oxford Dictionary ("heavy-headed nail for bootsoles") as well as in Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language, which Beckett would undoubtedly have consulted given his admiration for its author. The synecdochal transfer extends beyond the boot itself, for, in English at any rate, the 'hobnail' is likewise a person. The Oxford English Dictionary (1989), after specifying that the short nail with a round head was "used for the bottom of Plough-Men's shoes," gives a derived meaning: "A man who wears hobnailed shoes; a rustic, clodhopper, clown" (emphasis added).In Eleutheria, boots are indeed a key element, for they are clearly associated with identity. They come into play at the moment of Victor's father's death. That precise moment is an important turning point: The Vitrier has been summoned to repair the window Victor has broken. The symbolic value of broken glass (here a window pane) in the context of a play in which the protagonist suffers from the suffocating atmosphere of his bourgeois identity is obvious. His revolt is thus associated with his violent gesture and with the fact that it is his shoe thrown through the closed window that creates the crisis. The Vitrier has retrieved the shoe and returns it to him, nullifying the young man's rebellious act and exacerbating his frustration: "On ne peut rien perdre non plus" (71). What is he trying to lose? Victor's shoes, according to Dougald McMillan, represent his implication in the material world that holds the young man captive (106).The symbolic role attributed to boots or shoes is not, however, confined to Eleutheria. In the labyrinth-like search for meaning in the trilogy, Dieter Wellershoff - in an essay dating from 1963 - signals a kind of Ariadne's thread formed by a pair of shoes (176). In his essay Wellershof draws attention to a scene in Malone meurt in which a man wearing a pair of yellow shoes hits Malone on the head. He raises the question about who could be the author of this crime: "Is it Molloy or Moran who both killed an old man [...]? Has the incident now been repeated a third time?" (Wellershof, 176; my translation). The 'criminal act' being repeated here, Wellershof maintains, is one in which Malone finally "meets himself' (176). …

This study assesses the impact of Beckett's work upon the early work of the Northern Irish poet Derek Mahon. Arguing that Mahon co-opts Beckett as an influence by misreading his work as that of a lyric poet manque, the essay examines Mahon's handling of Beckett as source, model and 'adopted' precursor in four poems: "Exit Molloy," "An Image from Beckett," "Tithonus" and "The Last of the Fire Kings."The pros outweigh the cons that glowfrom Beckett's bleak reductio -Mahon, "Beyond Howth Head"1. "Exit Molloy"In a 1984 essay on Samuel Beckett's poetry, Derek Mahon called him "a minor and idiosyncratic poet" (1996, 50). As editor of The Sphere Book of Modern Irish Poetry in 1972, Mahon had represented Beckett by two poems and a "lyrical passage" from Waiting for Godot (1972b, 111-14) - the famous exchange from act 2 of the play about "All the dead voices" (the title Mahon gives it), complete with its name prefixes and stage directions. The 1984 essay ends by quoting the same passage which, Mahon asserts, "achieves [...] the condition of music" (1996, 53). The anthologist's co-option of the passage is perhaps not surprising. In early Beckett criticism (of the 1950s and 60s) it was commonplace to insist on the musical or "poetic" nature of much of his dramatic writing. In 1963, for example, Louis MacNeice, Mahon's poetic forerunner, described Beckett's drama as "essentially lyrical," asking "the sort of question that used to be the prerogative of poets" (124). In a 2006 essay Mahon effects the merger from the opposite direction when he describes Beckett's best poems, examples of "the existential lyric" (1996, 56), as "dramatic pieces in their own right [...] continuous with the work for stage" (2006, 1). But Mahon's anthologization of the passage from Godot also hints at a significantly personal reading.To present the Godo /-passage as an honorary lyric is to emphasize its qualities as a momentary illumination, a still point of insight amidst the tedium and anxiety of waiting. In its dramatic context these qualities are heavily qualified: illumination is both made possible and clouded by the obligation to speak, to bale out the silence. While epiphany is not a sine qua non of the lyric, the luminous moment is nonetheless native to the genre. In the drama, however, even the lyrical drama of Beckett, any moment of revelation is always likely to be submerged or rendered ambiguous by the current of the action. But Mahon's tendency has always been to read Beckett as a lyric poet manque. "Much of the time it is even dull," he wrote of Beckett's prose in 1976. "One is tempted to skip. [...] But the good bits are very good indeed. Not inexpressive as their author might wish, but expressive of a rare vision, like the 'brief scattered lights' [1959, 207] in Malone Dies" (1996, 60). In a 1986 tribute, Mahon asserts that the novels of Beckett are "a matter of texture rather than incident," quoting from How It Is: "a few images on and off in the mud earth sky a few creatures in the light some still standing" (Beckett 1964, 8). This insistence on the luminous moment issues in a remarkable observation about "the last words of Lucky's 'think' in Waiting for Godot, where 'the skull in Connemara,' 'the tennis' and 'Cunard' combine to suggest a Proustian glimpse of childhood, a summer afternoon in the west of Ireland during long-ago school holidays" (1996, 58).Although there is no evidence for it (Mahon was writing in 1976, before the first generally available biographical information about Beckett), this last speculation is shrewd enough: comfortably-off Protestant Dubliners might very well have holidayed in the West in the 1910s. And the Proust connection is natural. After all, Beckett's first book was a critical study which asserts that Proust's "entire book is a monument to involuntary memory and the epic of its action" (Beckett 1965a, 34). Furthermore Beckett always claimed that the vital shift in his own writing life and creative output, the trigger for the post-war "frenzy of writing," which produced the three novellas, the trilogy of novels and Waiting for Godot, was the result of a "revelation" (Knowlson 351-53) in his mother's room in Foxrock. …

Monadic spaces inhabit a significant number of both Beckett's and Gadda's narrative spaces. The refashioning and distortion of the Leibnizian concept of the monad in their oeuvres brings to light some essential features of both authors' critique of the traditional, unitary notion of the self. Indeed, the divergences which transpire in the reinterpretation of the rationalist concept of individual substance reveal a fascinating parallel relating to the fragmentation of subjectivity in both authors' writings. In this context, particular attention will be given to Gadda's early theoretical and fictional writings and Beckett's fiction up to the French Trilogy.

Samuel Beckett's works suggest that humans are dead like stones and stones are alive like creatures. The ambiguous border between humans and stones reflects Beckett's borderless grasp on life and death, which he envisions as the metamorphosis of human beings into a state of metaphysical stone that is indestructible and imbued with memories and feelings. Belacqua, Molloy, Malone, and the Unnamable share the vision of such a stone representing life in limbo. Focusing upon the image of stone in Beckett's works, this essay reads the trilogy in particular as an ontological transformation based on Leibnizian vitalism.

The theatre, by including non-linguistic forms of expression, plays an extremely significant part in Beckett's aim to bring disrepute upon language and to turn away from representational aesthetic aims. Before he began to explore dramatic forms of expression, however, Beckett's use of language was already 'dramatic' in a linguistic sense: it manifested high levels of . This article will examine the increasingly performative language of the Trilogy in relation to Beckett's use of a foreign language and demonstrate that the textually dramatic function of Beckett's language is directly related to his deliberate estrangement from language.

Through an examination of Beckett's usage of the rhetorical device of the 'enthymeme' I try to show how the grotesque in Beckett's Trilogy differs from previous literary examples of the mode. The article takes as its starting point Bakhtin's periodization of the grotesque in terms of carnival culture (Rabelais) and the 'subjective grotesque' (Sterne) and puts forward the argument that the abstractness of Beckett's gro tesque is its defining feature. By positioning Beckett's work in a gen eral history of the grotesque, I hopefully provide a context for under standing Beckett's 'modernist' grotesque and show how it is primarily concerned with the discovery of the new.

Beckett's name is associated with the absurd theatre and literature of "exhaustion " and silence. But he has remarkable interest in criticism and literary theory. His "Dante ... Bruno. Vico .. Joyce" (1929) and Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (1965). The present article attempts to read his Trilogy (IVlolloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable^ from this perspective. The first part is introductory as it discloses the critical insights explicitly stated about the language, self, philosophy and existence. The second section deals with the contro versial issues of language and narration, especially Beckett's use of narrators whose physical status is abnormal, but whose tales are con vincing enough. Beckett's Trilogy (1959) has never ceased stirring heated controversy among critics and scholars. This is partly due to the literary mode it represents (metafiction or anti-novel) and the startlingly pessimistic view. Man here loses nearly all human qualities: identity, name and character. The only thing that keeps him going is the language, the ability to describe and identify things. This last tie to human existence is what is striking in the whole Trilogy. As a metafiction, the novel consciously turns into a treatise where Beckett's ideas of philosophy, culture and the process of writ ing are investigated in detail. The present concentration here is on the critical insights that eventually render the Trilogy almost a critical text paving the way for the philosophical views of the poststructuralists and deconstructionists. Beckett's interest in critical activities dates back to the days when he was a student in Ireland where he had a great admiration for his former French professor, T. B. Rudmose-Brown (Mercier, 35). His great interest in French language and literature turns out to be a deci sive force in Beckett's future. Indeed, his two seminal critical texts

Beckett's name is associated with the absurd theatre and literature of "exhaustion" and silence. But he has remarkable interest in criticism and literary theory. His "Dante ... Bruno. Vico .. Joyce" (1929) and and (1965). The present article attempts to read his Trilogy ( and ) from this perspective. The first part is introductory as it discloses the critical insights explicitly stated about the language, self, philosophy and existence. The second section deals with the controversial issues of language and narration, especially Beckett's use of narrators whose physical status is abnormal, but whose tales are convincing enough.

In Beckett's novel Mercier and Camier, written in French in 1948 soon after World War II, history is a central concern. The novel has been neglected by critics, who either ignore it or underestimate it as a minor work with major flaws. Most studies focus on its intertextual relationships with Waiting for Godot or with the Trilogy; the few critics who identify some of the numerous historical references, including specific wars, point to an Irish context. It is possible, however, to see the gaps, obscurities, and digressions in it not as flaws but as Beckett's technique of evasion–a mayor artistic strategy.Three critical approaches are used: (1) an analysis of the evasiveness, which is a narrative technique and a feature of characterization. The combination of these approaches clarifies several puzzling aspects of this novel; (2) a Freudian reading; and (3) a neo-historical approach.This paper focuses in particular on several war memories which haunt the two titular protagonists, Mercier and Camier, and which dictate the twists and turns of their labyrinthine journey. True to the Freudian pattern of repression and return of the repressed, they reveal in displaced form their traumatic, shameful World War 11 experiences.

The overlooked pervasiveness of chronie sores on the bodies of Beckett's characters offers new explanations for both the disappearance of a realistic setting – one located in a specific place and time – in his first "mature" works (Watt through the 'Trilogy' and early plays) and his use of repetition. Using statements about memory in Proust as evidence, this essay demonstrates that epidermal eruptions (like cysts), because their pains are repetitious, lead Beckett's characters to dull their sensory perceptions, resulting in a perception of a dulled world. Finally, these sores suggest an alternative understanding of repetition in Beckett's texts to that of postructuralist readings.

No one doubts that Beckett was influenced by the skepticism of the eighteenth-century Irish philosopher George Berkeley; what is not appreciated, however, is the influence of the form of Berkeley's less well-known writings. Of particular importance are his youthful Philosophical Commentaries (kept in 1707-08), and his late, apparently incomplete Siris: A Chain of Philosophical Reflexions and Inquiries Concerning the Virtues of Tar-Water (published in 1744). Beckett knew both of these works and in them seems to have discovered formal models for the personal, tentative, philosophical fiction of the 'trilogy' and How It Is. In Beckett as in Berkeley, language and writing become not only the means but also the greatest impediment to understanding.

Ever since the seminal works of Hugh Kenner (1962), Ruby Cohn (1964), and other Beckett critics of the first generation, we have known about the richness in philosophical topics of Beckett's works and the manifold philosophical readings his texts purportedly lend themselves to. Among those, Beckett's association with existentialist thought has been perhaps the most persistent of all (see Esslin 1965, 4-10). In any case, Beckett criticism has tended to mirror the various twists, turns and crises of literary and philosophical theories of the past decades, responding to texts which "problematize the most basic concepts on which literary studies have been grounded and render them inoperative" (Fitch 1992, 126). It comes as no surprise, then, that ten years ago at the conference marking his 80th birthday, a "new Beckett" appeared once again, "thinkable only in the most recent terms" (Butler 1990, X). Beckett was discovered as a "poet of the poststructuralist age", as a "deconstructionist avant la lettre" (Butler 1990, X). Since then, his writings have been reread in the light of theories claiming textuality to supersede the subject,1 and a number of studies specifically on Beckett and Jacques Derrida's deconstruction have been published over the last years.2 Since Derrida has actually acknowledged his close affinity to Beckett's writings, nebulously finding him too close to write about (Derrida 1992, 60-62), this association seems to have somewhat ironically been granted authorization from the highest level. In short, linking Beckett to Deconstruction or Poststructuralism is not new. Well into the 1990s, moreover, Deconstruction seems on the wane, and as Steven Connor has suggested, its critical value to Beckett studies may legitimately be questioned. With its ever recurrent "denunciation of presence and logocentricity" (Connor 1992, 121), deconstruction has indeed tended to reproduce the same critical yield in spite of its proclaimed focus on the non-stability of textual meaning. Yet independent of the possible long-term critical sterility of Deconstruction, the affinity remains. It is between Beckett's insistence on the impossibility of a "true self, in particular as formulated in his trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (Beckett 1979), and Derrida's critique of the notion of self-presence of the subject (e.g., Derrida 1973; 1976). This affinity, however, needs revision. I suggest exploring it in both ways, for not only does Beckett's trilogy anticipate Derrida's