poststructuralist readings of beckett

Abstract

‘Whither literature?,’ ‘Où va la littérature?’ It was with these deceptively simple words that, in July 1953, the French novelist, philosopher, and literary critic, Maurice Blanchot, returned to the radical rethinking of the question of literature that had concerned him for a decade or more. Blanchot’s inquiry had many different aspects to it. It referred to literature’s questioning relationship to the world at large. More important, it also had to do, in Blanchot’s eyes, with literature’s challenge to philosophy (and that pale shadow of philosophy, literary criticism), whose authority over literature, since Mallarmé, had become increasingly precarious. More significant still was the question that literature posed to itself as to its own origin, purpose, and destiny, for this was a question, Blanchot argued in La Part du feu (The Work of Fire) in 1949, that had become synonymous with literature itself. Ten years later, as Blanchot’s thinking developed, it culminated in an influential and ground-breaking collection of essays entitled Le Livre à venir (The Book to Come). ¹ The volume is an important one for many reasons, not least, as far as readers of Beckett are concerned, because it was one of the very first to identify the crucial importance of Beckett’s trilogy for an understanding of modern (or postmodern) writing as such. Indeed, it was with a reprise of the famous opening words of L’Innommable (The Unnamable) — ‘Where now? Who now?’ — that in October 1953 Blanchot began to translate his own earlier question about the future of literature into contemporary terms.²