Decreation and the Voiding of Language in Beckett’s Late Prose Work. The AnaChronisT (Institute of English and American Studies, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest) Nr. 15 (2010), 157-171. ISSN 1219–2589 (original) (raw)
An attempt to offer inroads into Beckett's late short prose, especially the Stirrings Still and Nohow On "trilogies," the present paper proposes an exploration of the strategies by which linguistic expectations, as well as expectations pertaining to "literariness"stable reference, guration, allusion -are thwarted and disrupted. This overt denial of guration creates an absence, a transgression of normal linguistic implications which does not so much eliminate as call into being by erasing all such implications. Its effect of extreme compression, of baring language to the bone rests mainly on the traces, on the residua of guration/allusion which cannot be eliminated, cultural encoding which, in a context that refuses any but the strictest literal meaning, provides the peculiar linguistic humour of these texts: a humour of absences, of structures erased yet still shaping the utterance that has displaced them. A side-effect of this rigorous reduction/ erasure is a peculiar excess of language: a semiosis where the signier undergoes semantic, referential and thematic variation. This eventually results in an epiphany of language, based on the undoing of the distinction between linguistic gure and communicative phenomenon. The radically open, self-baring self-reexive text is (in) the event of reading, even if the reading is not (in) the text.
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