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6 - Beginning again

the post-narrative art of Texts for nothing and How it is

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2006

By
H. Porter Abbott
Edited by
John Pilling
John Pilling
Affiliation:
University of Reading
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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 - 123
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1994

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