The Remains of the Modern and the Exhaustion of Thematics: An Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 May 2017
Summary
ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή [The way upward and the way downward is one and the same.] (Heraclitus, fragment 60 (Diels), epigraph to T. S. Eliot's ‘Burnt Norton’, Four Quartets)
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
(Wallace Stevens, ‘The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm’)When I found myself, with students, reading some Beckett texts, I would take three lines, I would spend three hours on them, then I would give up because it would not have been possible, or honest, or even interesting to extract a few ‘significant’ lines from a Beckett text. The composition, the rhetoric, the construction and rhythm of his works, even the ones that seem most ‘decomposed’, that's what ‘remains’ finally the most ‘interesting’, that's the work, that's the signature, this remainder which remains when the thematics is exhausted […]. (Jacques Derrida, ‘This Strange Institution We Call Literature’)
Samuel Beckett's ‘Work in Process’
Samuel Beckett seemed, almost from the first, simultaneously here and there, within and without, of his time and beyond it, always somehow elsewhere, or rather between there and elsewhere, simultaneously rooted and rootless, historical and ahistorical. His oeuvre was the product of an artist who underwent serial re-conceptions, transformations and reinventions over his long writing career, and so his work is not easily classifiable, characterised as it is by change, movement, denials, rejections and negations. Thus, Beckett pushed his work beyond limits, restrictions, boundaries, and then pushed beyond yet again, to the exhaustion of the possible.
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- Information
- Beckett MattersEssays on Beckett's Late Modernism, pp. 1 - 16Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2017