Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 An endgame of aesthetics
- 2 Beckett's English fiction
- 3 Three novels and four nouvelles
- 4 Waiting for Godot and Endgame
- 5 Stages of identity
- 6 Beginning again
- 7 The mediated Quixote
- 8 Dead heads
- 9 Disabled figures
- 10 Beckett's poems and verse translations or
- 11 Beckett as director
- 12 Beckett's bilingualism
- 13 Beckett and the philosophers
- Further reading
- Index
6 - Beginning again
the post-narrative art of Texts for nothing and How it is
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- 1 An endgame of aesthetics
- 2 Beckett's English fiction
- 3 Three novels and four nouvelles
- 4 Waiting for Godot and Endgame
- 5 Stages of identity
- 6 Beginning again
- 7 The mediated Quixote
- 8 Dead heads
- 9 Disabled figures
- 10 Beckett's poems and verse translations or
- 11 Beckett as director
- 12 Beckett's bilingualism
- 13 Beckett and the philosophers
- Further reading
- Index
Summary
‘TEXTS FOR NOTHING’
'Yes, I'd have a mother, I'd have a tomb, I wouldn't have come out of here, one doesn't come out of here, here are my tomb and mother, it's all here this evening, I'm dead and getting born, without having ended, helpless to begin, that's my life.
(CSP, 101)From the start, Texts for nothing, which Beckett wrote in 1950-i, has been one of the orphans in his oeuvre. Few major critics have adopted it, and its individual texts are rarely anthologized. This has come about not so much from its difficulty as from the location of that difficulty in the course of Beckett's development. The referential uncertainty and drift in the passage above is easily matched by passages in the book Beckett wrote just prior to the Texts:
I have no explanations to offer, none to demand, the comma will come where I'll drown for good, then the silence, I believe it this evening, still this evening, how it drags on, I've no objection [...]
(T, 376)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Beckett , pp. 106 - 123Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994
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