Samuel Beckett's Search for the Lost Language

Samuel Beckett is best known for the books he wrote in French. An Irishman, he also wrote in English and translated many of his works himself from one language into the other. This essay explores Beckett’s ambivalent relationship with language in general. (The book also includes an extensive bibliography.)

This book is available from Amazon US, and from Amazon UK, or, for European residents, also from Amazon DE. 

Sam's Way

Beckett’s literary career begins with an essay on Marcel Proust and his monumental novel À la recherche du temps perdu. Some biographers believe that Beckett set out his personal poetics in it. The book opens with the enigmatic words “The Proustian equation is never simple.” [Proust, 11] Adapt-ing these words, one might say that the Beckettian equation is never simple either, for the following applies:

Samuel Beckett
= Anglo-Irish writer
= French writer

Two statements that contradict one another when placed directly side by side express two realities, the realities of a single person. Samuel Beckett is best known for the work he wrote in French, for his major works were created in this Romance language (although, in retrospect, I find the very notion of a major work wholly inadequate when applied to the oeuvre as a whole, especially if it is measured solely by popular success). As an Irishman whose native language was English, Beckett naturally also wrote in English, particularly at the begin-ning and during the last two decades of his life, which may give the impression that his English mother tongue frames the successes of his French-language years. As with many people interested in literature, it was the French theater that first entered my personal field of vision, followed much later by the prose. At the time, I regarded the fact that the author, who was still alive during my school and university years, was Irish as, at best, a minor curiosity.

Some periods of Beckett’s life show him as a writer who crossed over from one language to another, others as a thoroughly bilingual author. He was not, however, a refugee. No economic hardship had forced him to settle in a foreign country. Still less did other external or even personal circumstances compel him, as a writer, to switch to another language.

(…)

The Fugitive Word

In the final period of his creative life, novels became rare; Beckett’s last substantial prose text was Comment c’est in 1961. The second trilogy, from the 1980s, Company/Mal vu mal dit/Worstward Ho, is much shorter—together these three novels amount to only just over a hundred pages. Along-side shorter stories, Beckett mainly wrote plays, radio plays, and television works. Dialogues and monologues express contingency and negation; they work with corresponding filler words, sometimes cumbersome introductions and implicit distancing of the speakers from what is being said. “Nommer, non, rien n’est nommable, dire, non, rien n’est dicible…” [Nouvelles et textes pour rien, 190] (“Name, no, nothing is namable, tell, no, nothing can be told…”) sounds almost programmatic. The declining importance of spoken language is revealed by the fact that some plays, and television productions in particular, consist almost exclusively or indeed entirely of stage or production directions. Quad is a brilliant example: this television production offers visual impressions of movement and has much to do with geometrical, hence mathematical, considerations; but what one expects of literature is entirely absent. In the radio plays, sequences of music were incorporated on an equal footing with the spoken text, distancing them too from the conventional form of a radio play. One could of course argue that radio and television are quite different media, yet to my knowledge Samuel Beckett never explicitly regarded himself as a media artist. Friedhelm Rathjen, admittedly, also speaks of writer’s block and of a sense of having been drained after the fruitful creative period; this feeling intensified after Beckett received the Nobel Prize in 1969, owing to his aversion to publicity [RATHJEN, 108 f.]. Not only did the stage directions move into the foreground; Beckett also wanted them to be followed without exception. In a sense he let go of language, the basic medium of literary expression, yet he wanted to oversee and control completely what happened on stage, on television and in the radio play, as though he needed a counterbalance.

(…)

Order

This book is available from Amazon US, and from Amazon UK, or, for European residents, also from Amazon DE. 

Cover design:

Klaus Ebner, using a graphic by Comfreak on Pixabay, ( www.pixabay.com).