I

THERE IS A moment in Proust’s novel when Marcel hears a bird calling through the long afternoon:

     Somewhere in one of the tall trees, making a stage in its height, an invisible bird, desperately attempting to make the day seem shorter, was exploring with a long, continuous note the solitude that pressed it on every side, but it received at once so unanimous an answer, so powerful a repercussion of silence and of immobility that, one would have said, it had arrested for all eternity the moment which it had been trying to make pass more quickly.

This ‘long, continuous note’ of solitude resonates through Samuel Beckett’s work since the publication of his trilogy, Malloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, between 1951 and 1953. With increasing spareness and economy, he has reduced his prose to the point, in Lessness, where a few words are entered on the page, then repeated in various orders or identical phrases until their possible meanings have been exhausted. In his plays, we are asked to observe a stage littered with garbage, while an ‘instant of recorded vagitus’ (in the O.E.D., the word is obsolete, ‘a cry, lamentation, or wail’) punctuates the sound of breathing, or listen to a disembodied voice hectoring a hooded, silent auditor (Not I, 1973). What we are witnessing is the termination of an oeuvre designed to die with its author; the trope of immortality, of a work surviving its creator, has been suspended. Beckett would rather dismantle his own fictions than claim their endurance through time.

     And yet, despite this dwindling, the French editions of new texts appearing in their thin, white jackets, Beckett’s impulse to make of his work an autonomous tradition resembles in its strategies no one more than Joyce and Proust. Nor is this really surprising, given Beckett’s close personal relations with Joyce (some portions of Finnegans Wake were transcribed in his own hand, and he collaborated in the French translation of the Anna Livia Plurabelle chapter under Joyce’s direction); moreover, his first substantial work had been the monograph on Proust, published in 1930. A year earlier, he had contributed an essay, ‘Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce’, to the famous collaborative exegesis of Finnegans Wake, later collected in Our Exagmination round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. In light of his later decision to write in both English and French, composing two separate literatures, the convergence of Joyce and Proust becomes crucial.

     With Joyce, Beckett’s affinities are more obvious; Hugh Kenner has argued that ‘Beckett is the heir of Joyce as Joyce is the heir of Flaubert, each Irishman having perceived a new beginning in the impasse to which his predecessor seemed to have brought the form of fiction’ (1). Joyce, then, in conceiving a work which could recapitulate our experience of consciousness in history, and which could have no possible successor, can be said to have concluded the tradition of the European novel. Finnegans Wake subsumes within its borders the international character of Modernism, collective, encyclopedic, multilingual.

     Flaubert once expressed the desire to write ‘a book about nothing, a book without external support which would sustain itself by the internal power of its style as the earth is suspended in the air’. Beckett later detected this ambition in Joyce, whose ‘writing is not about something; it is that something itself’. And Beckett’s own writings in French after 1945 owe a great deal to this legacy of pure style, which achieves its finest expression in Mallarmé. Beckett once said that he wrote in French ‘parce qu’en français c’est plus facile d’ecrire sans style’. Such a remark would seem at first to counter the Flaubertian obsession with style, but what Beckett implies here is a writing in which all traces of ‘literature’ have disappeared, and been replaced with what has now come to be called écriture; so that when Roland Barthes draws attention to ‘this precarious moment of History in which literary language persists only the better to sing the necessity of its own death’, he intends écriture, a ‘closed system’ of discourse, to be the survivor of literary style. In this, Beckett resembles Ponge, whose ‘texts’ purport to be no more than explorations of the materiality, the viscous texture of language.

     How far this all seems from Joyce and Proust, those masters of the sprawling, elaborate Book! Their place in Beckett’s later work only becomes evident when we look to the tradition he has appropriated and made his own, a tradition located in what, speaking of Proust, he names ‘the necessity of art’. After the war, Beckett returned from the Unoccupied Zone to Paris (active in the Resistance, he had been forced to retreat there), and retired to his room to write the trilogy; for nearly four years, he lived in a manner that can’t escape comparison with Proust, spinning a dense web of remembrance in the voices of several related characters, all sharing in the sickliness of Proust’s narrator, and in his obsession with reconstructing past events in all their inexorable complexity. Despite their dereliction, these Molloys, Malones, and Mahoods are no less educated than the Marcel of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. In a reference to the trial of Madame Bovary, Molloy hears ‘what the great Gustave heard, the benches cracking in the Court of Assizes’, while in Malone Dies, the Lambert family (in the French version, Les Louis), recall Balzac’s own autobiographical model, Louis Lambert. Nevertheless, Molloy insists, during a difficult moment in his narrative, ‘It is not at this late stage of my relation that I intend to give way to literature’, and Malone breaks off a lyrical passage to announce: ‘To hell with all this fucking scenery’. This is Beckett’s declaration that, like Proust, he will surrender to the necessity to write, but will abjure the writing of ‘literature’.

     Though Beckett refers to Baudelaire only once in all his work (in Premier Amour), the motif of illness, the temptation to ‘enthrone my infirmities’ is everywhere in evidence. Jacques Rivière said once that Proust died because ‘he did not know how to open a window’; it is this capitulation to the condition of an invalid that appears in Baudelaire, in Proust, and in the experience of Symbolism. Baudelaire’s direct echo of Poe, ‘anywhere out of this world’, has its correlative in Beckett’s figures, literary enough to long for burial in the Pére Lachaise, yet suffering, in a variation of Proust’s asthma, from the ‘grand apnoea’; in one of the dialogues with Georges Duthuit, Beckett spoke of ‘the disquiet of him who lacks an adversary’. And this is the other malady visible in Baudelaire and Proust: the oppressiveness of modern urban life, oppressive because its true character is concealed from all but the most clever of antagonists. Baudelaire’s sense of isolation in the crowd, the world he fashioned on the boulevards, appears in Beckett’s Malone, observing ‘the people who throng the streets’ toward evening:

At this hour then erotic craving accounts for the majority of couples. But these are few compared to the solitaries pressing forward through the throng, obstructing the access to places of amusement, bowed over the parapets, propped against vacant walls.

Walter Benjamin, in his remarkable study of Baudelaire, A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, noted that ‘It takes a heroic constitution to live Modernism’. Beckett’s characters inherit this resistance to the disease of the modern, which so disfigures human relationships. Their sturdiness and endurance belong more to Baudelaire’s resourceful flâneur than to the later Symbolists, whose aesthetic depended on the exacerbation of nerves.

     But how account for Beckett’s defection to the French language after Murphy, Watt, and the early stories (collected in More Pricks Than Kicks)? There were some precedents: the epoch of English Symbolism borrowed its features from the French (Arthur Symons’ The Symbolist Movement in Literature becomes the central work in this exchange). Wilde wrote Salomé first in French. And Ford Madox Ford had translated The Good Soldier into French without even consulting his own original text. Beckett’s early work, though, is intensely Joycean, consciously Irish, so that the transition to French seems even more dramatic. His first fictional work, More Pricks Than Kicks, the distillation of an earlier, abandoned novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, reveals both the broad humour and geographical specificity of Joyce. The protagonist of these ten stories, Belacqua Shuah, (2) is a Trinity student, a wanderer through Dublin, and a sort of comic Stephen Dedalus. More than Ulysses, the resemblance here is to Dubliners, with its rehearsals of Irish dialect (Beckett has also acknowledged the influence of Synge). But there are scattered explicit imitations of the later Joyce: the inclusion of invitations, dates, and letters; archaic or invented words (cenotheca, aliquots, ebriety); foreign languages; passages of music; borrowed names (Purefoy recalls Joyce’s Wilhelmina Purefoy in Ulysses); deliberate echoes of Swift; and an immense word compounded of English and German that mimes Joyce’s hundred-letter thunderclaps in Finnegans Wake.

     Murphy, his first published novel (1938), was no less Joycean than the stories: landladies reading A.E.’s Candle of Vision; versions of the Ithaca chapter in Ulysses, where Joyce organised and parodied scientific knowledge in a manner reminiscent of Bouvard et Pécuchet (in Murphy, Beckett informs us that ‘the moon, by a strange coincidence full and at perigee, was 29,000 miles nearer the earth than it had been for four years’); an extravagance of jokes and Irish banter. Beckett’s apprenticeship to Joyce was calculated and intense, from 1929, when he came to Paris, until the publication of the trilogy, by which time he was writing exclusively in French. Even in Watt (1942-44), where the weird, repetitive mode that later came to dominate his work was first unveiled, there are obvious Joycean elements: disruption of the text by spaces and musical notation; the long, elaborate sentences incorporating all possible explanations of an event; Watt’s odd internal monologues that echo Leopold Bloom’s. The novel, set in the Ireland Beckett remembered from his childhood, is no less localised than Joyce’s own Dublin, and his characters talk in loquacious Irish voices not heard again in Beckett’s writing until the radio play, All That Fall, of 1957.

     In these earlier works, Beckett’s ambivalence toward Ireland, like Joyce’s, was expressed in a close attention to detail, and in the portrait of Irish history as an experience rooted in oppressive politics and religion. Both Joyce and Beckett, in their Paris exile, devoted themselves to the reconstruction of their abandoned nation, the plotting of Dublin streets and landmarks, and both examined their own backgrounds in considerable depth. Beckett’s Ireland is more opaque than Joyce’s, his explicit references obviously fewer; nevertheless, the same events that excited Yeats and Joyce appear in Murphy, even if in a parodic rather than solemn manner. Where Yeats had applauded, with some reserve, the Easter Rebellion, and commemorated its heroes, and where Joyce had seen in Parnell Ireland’s ‘Uncrowned King’, Beckett satirised the intensity of feeling generated by Ireland’s embattled past; Neary, a character in Murphy, is observed ‘in the General Post Office, contemplating from behind the statue of Cuchulain . . . Suddenly he flung aside his hat, sprang forward, seized the dying hero by the thighs and began to dash his head against his buttocks, such as they are.’ (3)

     Joyce’s hatred of what he has Simon Dedalus call ‘an unfortunate priestridden race’, of Ireland, ‘the sow that eats her own farrow’, competed with his loyalties, just as Yeats had both ranted against and celebrated his country, often in a single breath; Beckett, like Yeats a member, not of the Ascendancy, but of the Protestant middleclass, noted once that Protestantism ‘had no more depth than an old school tie’. Even so, the portrait of Father Ambrose in Molloy reveals a hostility toward those religious institutions (in this case, Catholic) which had made Ireland so moribund. Adaline Glasheen, in a fine essay on ‘Joyce and the Three Ages of Parnell’, suggested that Joyce, in his later work, ‘had come to see that spiritual sickness is not localised or Irish, but common to all men everywhere’; and it was this insight, evident in the bleak landscape of the trilogy, that led Beckett to universalise the situations he treated, to withdraw from the later work all but a few traces of the more specific Ireland of Murphy and the earlier stories, leaving only the distillation of his own mental experience. Conor Cruise O’Brien has proposed that Irishness ‘is not primarily a question of birth or blood or language. It is the condition of being involved in the Irish situation, and usually of being mauled by it.’ In this sense, Beckett has drawn from Ireland a number of characteristics that he shares with Synge, the sprawl and wit of Irish speech, with Yeats, a story-telling ability, and with Joyce, among whose cherished traits were ‘silence, exile, and cunning’.

     When Beckett began writing in French, he continued to exploit some of the more conventional narrative elements of the novel. Mercier et Camier (the first work of Beckett’s to be composed in French, with the exception of a few poems and the translation of Murphy) relates the journey of two characters through some indeterminate landscape. Their dialogues, like those of Bouvard and Pécuchet, are bewildered and abstract; every third chapter offers a ‘résumé des deux châpitres précédents’ not unlike Flaubert’s abbreviated lists of adventures in his two protagonists’ lives. Here, too, despite the absence of a specific plot or situation, an episodic development could be discerned, and there was a coherence to their comic meditations:

What have we done to God he said.
We have denied him, said Camier.
You will not make me believe that his rancour goes to these lengths, said Mercier.

And in Premier Amour, written the same year, Beckett produced a masterpiece of storytelling. This novella, the last of his works to be told from the vantage of a younger man, belongs more among Beckett’s novels in English; like the earliest stories, Premier Amour involves a reclusive and somewhat distracted narrator who recalls his unfortunate affair with a woman encountered on the banks of a river. He divulges only that neither of them were French, that he had been evicted from his house following the death of his father and had then moved in with the woman, who supported them by prostitution. The strange affair ends, and he leaves her apartment, having decided that ‘l’amour, cela ne se commande pas’ (love doesn’t depend upon our will).

     The direction of Beckett’s own life can be detected here; well-educated and more urbane than the later protagonists, the dour speaker admits: ‘J’avais lu des romans, en prose et en vers, sous la direction demon tuteur, en anglais, en français, en italien, en allemand.’ And elsewhere: ‘Oui, je regrette, j’avais de la lecture.’ After resigning from Trinity, where he had been an instructor, Beckett spent several years travelling through Europe; his self-imposed exile, like Joyce’s, was a condition expressed in figures like Belacqua Shuah and the narrator of Premier Amour, who suggests, ‘Bricoler, c’est encore une chose possible.’ Lévi-Strauss, in The Savage Mind, describes the bricoleur as someone ‘adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks’, but whose ‘universe of instruments is closed . . . the rules of his game are always to make do with “whatever is at hand”, that is to say with a set of tools and materials which is always finite’. In Beckett’s case, this finite set (4) is language, which articulates its own borders; it could be conjectured that Beckett had been oppressed by the virtual infinitude of English, with its excessive richness, its diversity of idioms, and so turned to French because it possessed such stringent limits. Joyce’s solution, in Finnegans Wake, had been to circumvent these limits, invading other languages, inventing words, expanding ordinary grammar until it was capable of embracing several tenses at once. Beckett’s, stated in Premier Amour, was to become a ‘roi sans sujets’:

La chose qui m’intéressait moi . . . c’était la supination cérébrale, l’assoupissement de l’idée de moi et de l’idée de ce petit résidu de vétilles empoisonnantes qu’on appelle le non-moi, et même le monde, par paresse. (5)

     John Fletcher, in his book on The Novels of Samuel Beckett, has provided a close reading of Beckett’s French style in its earliest stages, showing how gallicisms had begun to surface in his English prose, and how traces of awkwardness in the French of the Nouvelles (1946) were excised in later editions. What Fletcher’s account reveals is the complexity of Beckett’s transition from English to French, a transition which resulted in the location and refinement of a voice anxious to hear, ‘beyond the fatuous clamour, the silence of which the universe is made’. With the trilogy, Beckett turns to the first-person mode of narrative introduced in Premier Amour, and so enters the dense, reductionist world of the later prose. George Steiner has noted ‘Beckett’s thinness, his refusal to see in language and literary form adequate realisations of human feeling or society’, and it is this conviction that inhabits all his work after 1945, when he wonders, ‘What’s the matter with my head, I must have left it in Ireland, in a saloon, it must be there still, lying on the bar’; having chosen to compose in French, Beckett abandoned the musical Irish lilt of Joyce and Synge. Nothing of Ireland would remain once the trilogy was complete, unless the ‘desolate heaven’ of Yeats.

II

Beckett’s narrator in The Calmative, collected in Nouvelles et Textes Pour Rien, announces, ‘we are in a skull’; it is from this hermetic chamber that all the later work issues. The characters in the trilogy share in a condition of impossible solitude, alone, like their author, in rooms where nothing reverberates except Memory, ‘the sensation itself, annihilating every spatial and temporal restriction’ (from the monograph on Proust). However opaque their situation, Molloy, Malone, Mahood, even the Unnamable, are storytellers, aware of each other and of their place in Beckett’s oeuvre: ‘a gallery of moribunds. Murphy, Watt, Mercier, and all the others’. (Like Balzac’s, Beckett’s characters appear over and over in the novels, a troupe whose identities are assumed to be well known.) When Jacques Moran retires to his desk to write a report on Molloy, he begins: ‘It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows.’ In the novel’s last paragraph, Moran is referred to in the third person, while another voice concludes: ‘Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.’ This disclosure dissolves the fiction of the entire novel, just as the last pages of Malone Dies, where several inmates of a mental institution are murdered by a madman named Lemuel (Swift is a constant presence in Beckett’s work), end in the breakdown of language:

never there he will never
never anything
there
any more

In the same way, Molloy finds it impossible to render his experience coherent: ‘It seemed to me that all language was an excess of language.’ Hesitant to elucidate what appears impenetrable, the texture of a world in which contingencies impose their will, Beckett verifies Wittgenstein’s claim: ‘Nothing is lost if one does not seek to say the unsayable. Instead, that which cannot be spoken is —unspeakably — contained in that which is said!’ The ‘Unnamable’ of Beckett’s novel is a protagonist, but also a felt condition, the expression of necessity: ‘Having nothing to say, no words but the words of others, I have to speak. No one compels me to, there is no one, it’s an accident, a fact.’ Inevitably, the identical nature of accident and fact is what determines Beckett’s vantage, from which the violation of Wittgenstein’s axiom would appear to be so dangerous; to state what is ‘unsayable’ is to invent reality rather than elicit its character.

     There is a crucial passage in Malone Dies where Beckett notes the manner in which the Saposcats, a frail married couple, communicate: ‘They had no conversation properly speaking. They made use of the spoken word in much the same way as the guard of a train makes use of his flags, or of his lantern.’ Such a metaphor underlies the whole enterprise of structural linguistics and semiology; in particular, Saussure’s map of language as a system of signs, where the signifier, or expressive lexicon, mediates the signified, in Roland Barthes’ words, a mental representation’ of the thing expressed. So that when Beckett complains there is ‘nothing to signify’, it should be clear that he will no longer operate within the realm of ordinary linguistic discourse. Inscribed in Beckett’s trilogy is an obstinate refusal to mean; signs are to be self-referential, their employment no more ambiguous, no less arbitrary than a train-signal.

     And yet, there still exist in these novels remnants of place and exact locale; Molloy’s Bally is Beckett’s Ireland, while Father Ambrose, who dispenses Communion to Moran, possesses the provincial temperament of Joyce’s priests. The Unnamable’s cadence of speech echoes the vehemence of Swift; on occasion traces of a baroque and formal prose remain, vestiges of Ruskin or Sir Thomas Browne left standing in the ruins of English literature. The Textes Pour Rien which follow the trilogy reveal Beckett’s increased impatience with language, and his renunciation of those formal properties which once represented the novel. Writing has become, literally, ‘wordshit’ (in the French version, fatras, a somewhat milder epithet); the writer’s apprenticeship to words is shown to be a chronicle of lost nerve:

Words, mine was never more than that, than this pell-mell babel of silence and words, my viewless form described as ended, or to come, or still in progress, depending on the words, the moments, long may it last in that singular way.

What Beckett struggles to situate after the trilogy is ‘a new no’, since, were the voice to cease quite at last, the old ceasing voice, it would not be true’. Steiner has often contended that silence is the central motif of European Modernism, and will summon Webern, Hofmansthai, and Hermann Broch as witnesses to the devastation that has ended in what he calls ‘post-culture’: ‘a strain of barbarism, of profound disillusion with literacy’ ushered in by the spectacle of the Nazi Holocaust and hastened by mass culture. Beckett’s disposition, despite the near-inarticulate, the diminished tonalities of his work over the last two decades, has been to counter this impulse toward silence.

     The ‘new no’ that becomes clarified in the later texts corresponds to Adorno’s gloss: ‘To Beckett, as to the Gnostics, the created world is radically evil, and its negation is the chance of another world that is not yet’ (Negative Dialectics). Ironically enough, then, it’s possible to consider the shreds of discourse, the rude, unfinished soliloquys that are Beckett’s tactic now, utopian, in that writing promises a way out of the impasse created by modern life, which is, after all, a ‘concentration camp’ (in Adorno’s view). And this is what occupies the disembodied voices of From an Abandoned Work, Enough, Ping, Imagination Dead Imagine, Lessness, and The Lost Ones: the activity of escape.

     Even the thin appearance of these works implies the transience of a condition which poses no hope of respite in this world; there is nothing to be done except survive, always with Kafka’s admonition in mind, that ‘There is Infinite Hope, but not for us’. These texts disclose the dwindling store of experience that can still be validated and made other than random. Literature is discontinuous, a set of images that exist only to be repudiated. From an Abandoned Work (1958) illustrates this tendency: a figure wanders over some adumbrated landscape, falling, struggling up, then pushing on. During this ordeal, he recalls his parents, his education, his eventual dereliction, and a number of images which possess a stubborn importance: the colour white, a white horse, a synaesthetic white ‘sound’; ‘all has gone but mother in the window, the violence, rage and rain’. The voice still manages to achieve moments of lyrical utterance, though, before lapsing into repetition.

     The thirteen pages of From an Abandoned Work are all that remain of a novel initiated in 1955 and, in a literal sense, abandoned later on. What Hugh Kenner calls the ‘complex hermetic miseries’ of this text elaborate a theme that has no resolution. Like Ping, a four-page fragment collected twelve years later in No’s Knife (the title is drawn from the thirteenth ‘text for nothing’, where Beckett hears ‘the screaming silence of no’s knife in yes’s wound’), From an Abandoned Work subscribes to Valéry’s theory that a work is never completed, only abandoned in the midst of its composition. In a preface to the 1967 edition, the editors note: ‘Ping is all that is left of a novel that Mr. Beckett started on in late 1965.’ It seems reasonable to say, then, that the texts after 1950 encounter a problem not entirely deliberate; since their development is entropic, tending toward a reduced state of consciousness, these works would appear to stipulate their own eventual disappearance. The dissolution of grammar, the reduction of language to mere sound notation, places Beckett’s writing within the domain of contemporary criticism in France, where discussion no longer approaches an imaginative work as literature, but as écriture. The text has become an example, a literary artifact encircled by hermeneutics. Its intent is to provide a point of departure for speculation about linguistics, critique de conscience, and phenomenology. The consequence of such practices is, of course, that literature forfeits its own interpretive capacities; where once it acted as a lens through which the social world could be magnified or distorted by the writer’s own sensibility, now the work of art imitates theories of criticism, serving as a pretext for their otherwise unfocused energies. This explains why the progressive diminution of Beckett’s work has been accompanied by the most elaborate criticism ever devoted to a contemporary (Kenner concludes his discussion of Come and Go, a miniature ‘dramaticule’, with the observation that he has written ‘almost three times as many words as the text contains’), and why it requires the technical, immense apparatus of contemporary French criticism to support its lean structure.

     Another feature of such enterprises is their claim to science; what are called in France les sciences humaines have increasingly taken over the procedures of science. Structuralism in linguistics, anthropology, and psychoanalysis tends to construct exact and technical models, as if to refute any suspicion that such disciplines are still speculative or subjective. With science and its technological resources threatening to render imagination tautological (Adorno identifies in Beckett s End Game the notion that ‘there really is not so much to be feared any more’), the only choice available to the writer who wishes to record this impingement of the actual upon the imagined is to appropriate science as a metaphor. So Beckett has erased from his texts those very features of literature which once made it capable of transcendence: fictions; imaginative re-creations of history; invented lives. His later texts plot a world circumscribed by mathematics. A remark he made once about the painter Jack Yeats informs his own work: ‘He brings light, as only the great dare to bring light, to the issueless predicament of existence, reduces the dark where there might have been, mathematically at least, a door.’ To locate this door demands the rigour of mathematics, and Beckett directs us, in Imagination Dead Imagine, to ‘omit islands, waters, azure, verdure’: in other words, all that represents the world in a figurative manner. Rather, we discover ourselves in a rotunda, ‘Diameter three feet, three feet from ground to summit of the vault. Two diameters at right angles AB CD divide the white ground into two semicircles ACB BDA.’ And The Lost Ones (Le Dépeupleur, 1970) inhabit a cylinder fifty meters round and eighteen high, from which escape seems possible, though none of the two hundred ‘bodies’ ever achieve it. Enough (1965) is Beckett’s last attempt to report even the semblance of a story, though the discourse is entirely mathematical, expressed in what Kenner calls ‘geometrical visualisations’; the narrative, told in the first person, relates the prolonged journey of a couple whose ages are unspecified, and the desertion of the other. Obsessive calculations of the distance travelled, ‘Whole ternary numbers in this way to the third power sometimes in downpours of rain’, dominate his recollections.

     Lessness, Beckett’s most recent published prose, announced a further diminution of landscape; the transition between ‘subject object subject object’ noted in How It Is has its counterpart in serial music, with its total organisation of the tone row. In the twenty-four paragraphs of Lessness, each sentence is repeated once, and the sixty sentences that compose the work are divided in tens, within which each set features a recurrent word or phrase. There is no longer any question of episode or even voice; Ping has no verbs, and is orchestrated with an equivalent of rests: ‘ping silence ping over’. Where, in How It Is, the absence of punctuation allows us to arrange the phrases to form variant readings, the later texts refuse even this modest anarchy, and insist on the suppression of randomness.

     It could be said that Beckett has worked out the consequences of Modernism, producing the companion to Rauschenberg’s white canvases. To wish that he had continued to write in the verbal, anecdotal tradition of Irish literature, or embroidered Proust, would be nostalgic; both Finnegans Wake and A La Recherche du Temps Perdu were the last comprehensive works in their respective literatures, when the totality of lived experience could be deposited in a book. Mallarmé had conceived a similar project, proposing that Tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir à un livre. Beckett’s recent work constitutes the residuum of this Livre. There were moments, though, when I read these texts with the hope that, like Borges’ Funes the Memorious, who devised a system in which all numbers were given special titles, he would provide us, not simply with ciphers, but with names to revive and enhance their value.