“The Churn of Stale Words in the Heart Again”: Beckett’s Final Return

Abstract

Coming out of a period of writing that included A Piece of Monologue for actor David Warrilow in the late 1970s, Beckett turns to a series of prose pieces that become his late prose “Trilogy,” Nohow On: Company (1980), Ill Seen, Ill Said (1981), and Worstward Ho (1983). A Piece of Monologue recalls familiar scenes from Beckett’s past that evoke the father: “There was father. That grey void …. He alone. So on. Not now. Forgotten.”³ Like the drama, the late prose texts are Beckett’s signature pieces for postmodern minimalism. On the one hand, truncating and paring his prose (as well as his drama) down to near-nothingness is a stylistic and aesthetic choice by Beckett. On the other hand, the stripping down of sentences and images may also be a way for him to represent Anglo-Irish community’s cultural decline and historical erasure.

Function of compulsion-neurosis: to unburden and free the patient by means of diseased compulsion from the compulsion due to the necessary demands made by society; to construct a subsidiary field of action in order to be able to flee from the main battle-field of life & fritter away time that might otherwise compel him to fulfill his individual tasks.

Alfred Adler¹

With leastening words say least best worse.

Worstward Ho²