Imagination’s Dead: Beckett’s Catastrophic Realism

Abstract

Beginning a consideration of Beckett and catastrophe with an overview of the catastrophic landscapes that are visible in profusion throughout the world right now, this paper seeks to show that Beckett’s work can now be seen to treat historical catastrophe directly, that the vision it offers has been more and more realised, and that this can be seen in a catastrophically shaped interpenetration of subjectivities and landscapes. The refusal of and panic at assimilation into ‘life’ staged in so many of Beckett’s texts thus dramatises a separation that has already been destroyed. This interpenetration is pushed in Beckett’s work to the point of an indistinction, precisely indicated and articulated in The Unnamable, a point where the imagination itself is catastrophised in the manner of the world from which it attempts to separate itself. Beckett’s fictive and literary spaces thus register historical catastrophe through an insistent refusal that can only meet with inevitable failure. Beckett’s well known embrace of this failure, and of the meagre and ongoing work of a deathly imagination, is an index of this work’s self-conscious historicality. The remainders it gives to be read bear forth the imagination’s dead, its precarious and dwindling survivals.