BECKETT: SUBTRACTION, ABSTRACTION, ANNIHILATION

“Proper names scream.” — Richard Makin

The literary career of Samuel Beckett can be roughly summarized as a reaction to the work of Joyce. After an initial output explicitly reflected its Joycean origins, Beckett moved away from the linguistic exuberance to a more stripped-down aesthetic. In each successive work, he struggled to pare away characters, plot, and setting. The incessant movement (and desire for movement) found in The Trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable) yielded to a later trilogy, one focused on inertia and the conquest of nothingness (Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho). In these last works, Beckett wrestles with the contradictory notion that to write about nothing, to write a no-thing, is still to be left with a something, a material residue left on the page.

“Enough. A pox on void. Unmoreable unlessable unworseable evermost almost void.” Worstward Ho has this passage, near the end of the work, after Beckett writes “Say child gone. […] Say old man gone. Old woman gone.” These allusions to the “characters” (if they can be classified as such) in the previous novels remind the reader of Beckett’s drawing back the curtain towards the end of The Trilogy when all the Molloys and Morans and Malones are revealed to be fabrications, mere impressions on the page, nothing more than concoctions the author made for his own amusement. Despite Beckett’s constant quest to write nothingness, he is still left with words on the page, even as he pries them apart and/or drains them of any meaning. While we generally are meaning-making creatures, Beckett strives for an aesthetic that makes-meaningless. Yet even an anti-novel is still a novel.