Samuel Beckett’s bodies limp, crawl, grope, fall, collapse, and scream. They are broken, fragmented, disabled, prosthetic, imprisoned, and paralyzed. Like the disintegrating state of his bodies, his language stutters, falters, pauses, stammers, retreats, repeats, and ultimately fails to fully mean. More than any other writer in this book, and quite possibly in twentieth-century literary history, Beckett’s works exemplify the failure of language to express the meaning it seeks to capture, and the failure of the body to mean in the absence of a language that can adequately represent it. Evidence for what has often been termed Beckett’s ‘aesthetics of failure’ abound in comments he made on both his own work and on art in general. In Three Dialogues (1949), the Beckett persona speaks of a type of expression in which “there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.” The only way out of this impasse is to make “an expressive act […] of its impossibility.” Elsewhere, Beckett emphasizes the need to break down the “terrifyingly arbitrary materiality of the word surface,” characterizing language as “a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it.” He is similarly suspicious of formal wholeness. He assigns the artist the task of finding a form that accommodates “mess,” which is “the very opposite of form.” He equally takes to task a monograph on Proust for imposing “a beautiful unity of tone and treatment” that “embalmed the whole.” Aesthetic unity equals a creative death.

These are powerful statements about aesthetics that cleave (to) the materiality of language, both splitting and adhering matter and form. They all gesture towards the power of aesthetics to represent the material body. Scholarship on Beckett likewise reproduces this ambivalence, frequently connecting Beckett’s supposed aesthetics of failure to language’s inability to render the body’s materiality. Leslie Hill refers to “the unrepresentable rhythmic pulse of the body” that supplements the failure of the corporealized subject to speak. Christopher Ricks writes that the moments where words fail “speak of the body’s failing.” Andrew Gibson argues that the “presentation of the body” is “caught up in and affected by the aporetic nature of Beckett’s narrative discourse.”