Abstract
At the heart of the high modernist aesthetic lies a commitment to radical linguistic renewal—or what has come to be known as a ‘revolution of the word’. Beckett’s early work adheres in many respects to this high modernist aesthetic, which constitutes a radical response to late nineteenth-century language scepticism. However, from the late 1930s onwards, Beckett commits himself increasingly to what he describes as a ‘literature of the unword’, in which language is turned back against itself through forms of linguistic negativism. This chapter considers the specificities of Beckett’s linguistic negativism in relation to that of a number of other twentieth-century European writers, including Franz Kafka, Maurice Blanchot, and Paul Celan, to argue that their ‘unwording’ practices are characteristic of a ‘late’ modernism.
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Notes
- 1.
‘Ex Cathezra’, The Bookman, Christmas 1934 (Dis 77–79).
- 2.
‘Recent Irish Poetry’, The Bookman, August 1934 (Dis 70–76).
- 3.
- 4.
Beckett’s enthusiasm for Sade is evident in a letter to Thomas MacGreevy dated 21 February 1938 and written after Beckett had read volumes I and III of a three-volume French edition of 120 Days: ‘It fills me with a kind of metaphysical ecstasy. The composition is extraordinary, as rigorous as Dante’s’ (LSB I 607).
- 5.
See, for instance, Beckett to Thomas MacGreevy, 16 September 1934: ‘what I feel in Cézanne is precisely the absence of a rapport that was all right for Rosa or Ruysdael for whom the animising mode was valid, but would have been false for him, because he had the sense of his incommensurability not only with life of such a different order as landscape but even with life of his own order’ (LSB I 227). In a letter to his literary agent, George Reavey, dated 23 March 1938, Beckett goes so far as to assert that painting ‘began’ with Cézanne (612).
- 6.
In Roland Barthes, Barthes defines the ‘writerly’ text as ‘one I read with difficulty, unless I completely transform my reading regime’ (1977: 118).
- 7.
Eliot’s argument is as follows: ‘It is not a permanent necessity that poets should be interested in philosophy, or in any other subject. We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning’ (1975: 65).
- 8.
See Beckett to Thomas MacGreevy, 26 April 1937: ‘I read Dujardin’s Lauriers… and realised how extremely charitable it was in Joyce to invoke him to Larbaud & how very modest his proposal that his conception of the monologue was not identical with the model’s. Or perhaps it was neither charity nor modesty, but simply astuce again’ (LSB I 489–490).
- 9.
The few exceptions to this, such as All That Fall, tend to emphasize the general, although rarely complete, resistance to socio-historical context elsewhere. This is not to suggest that Beckett is not politically engaged. Evidence of that engagement is both provided and analysed in detail in Morin (2017).
- 10.
In his 1934 review of a selection of Rilke’s poetry in English translation, he acknowledges that Rilke was capable of producing poetry of a ‘high order’, but also claims that much of Rilke’s ‘verse’ exhibits a ‘breathless petulance’ and a ‘childishness’ in its reliance upon the figures of ‘God, Ego, Orpheus and the rest’ (Dis 66–67).
- 11.
Letter to Arland Ussher, 11 July 1937 (qtd. in LSB I 516).
- 12.
Wittgenstein declares in the Tractatus that ‘All philosophy is “Critique of language” (but not at all in Mauthner’s sense)’ (1981: 4.0031).
- 13.
On the question of precisely when Beckett read Mauthner, see Van Hulle (1999).
- 14.
In Watt, the full force of Beckett’s nominalism (to which he also refers in his 1937 letter to Kaun) is felt, as objects come to resist categorization in the necessarily universalizing (repeatable) form of words: ‘For Watt now found himself in the midst of things which, if they consented to be named, did so as it were with reluctance. […] Looking at a pot, for example, or thinking of a pot, at one of Mr. Knott’s pots, of one of Mr. Knott’s pots, it was in vain that Watt said, Pot, pot. Well, perhaps not quite in vain, but very nearly’ (W 67).
- 15.
T. S. Eliot alludes to Mallarmé’s phrase in the last of the Four Quartets, ‘Little Gidding’ (1942), when he writes of the need to ‘purify the dialect of the tribe’ (1969: 194).
- 16.
- 17.
Sartre identifies an ‘extraordinary resemblance’ between Aminadab and Kafka’s The Castle, rather than any direct and empirically verifiable influence of Kafka on Blanchot (1947: 123).
- 18.
For an analysis of Blanchot’s linguistic negativism, see Weller (2015b).
- 19.
Blanchot characterizes The Unnamable in relation to his own thinking on the relation between necessity and impossibility, as a work that is ‘deprived of all resources, one that accepts beginning at that point where no continuation is possible, obstinately clings to it, without trickery, without subterfuge, and conveys the same discontinuous movement, the progress of what never goes forward’ (2003: 213).
- 20.
For an analysis of Kafka’s linguistic negativism, and the manner in which it anticipates that of the European late modernists, see Weller (2016b). For an analysis of Blanchot’s, Celan’s, and Sebald’s linguistic negativism, and its relation to Kafka’s and Beckett’s, see Weller (2013, 2015b, and 2016a), respectively.
- 21.
See, for instance, Berlin (1999).
- 22.
In a letter of 14 June 1939 to Arland Ussher, Beckett remarks upon his current reading of Hölderlin’s novel Hyperion, and upon what he describes as the ‘terrific fragments of the Spätzeit’ (LSB I 664–665).
- 23.
‘Pallaksh’ is reputed to have been the word that Hölderlin, in his madness, would repeat when any straight answer to a question would have been a compromise.
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Weller, S. (2018). From Language Revolution to Literature of the Unword: Beckett as Late Modernist. In: Beloborodova, O., Van Hulle, D., Verhulst, P. (eds) Beckett and Modernism. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70374-9_3
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