To You

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Table of Contents

Table of Contents .............................................................................................................................................. 3

Foreword ........................................................................................................................................................... 4

Chapter One: Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 5

General Background ...................................................................................................................................... 5

Definition of Key Terms .............................................................................................................................. 13

Chapter Two: Self-Deconstructive Motifs ........................................................................................................ 17

Time ............................................................................................................................................................ 18

Death ........................................................................................................................................................... 23

Identity ........................................................................................................................................................ 32

Love ............................................................................................................................................................ 36

Chapter Three: Self-deconstructiveness of Language ....................................................................................... 43

Poetics of Failure ......................................................................................................................................... 44

Reductive Variations to Say the Same Thing ............................................................................................. 45

Shattered Syntax ...................................................................................................................................... 48

Silence ..................................................................................................................................................... 52

Music ....................................................................................................................................................... 54

Translation as Impossible and Necessary ...................................................................................................... 58

Chapter Four: Self-deconstructiveness of Imagery............................................................................................ 63

Between Two Worlds: Microcosm/ Macrocosm ........................................................................................... 64

Equivocal Images ......................................................................................................................................... 69

Chapter Five: Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 73

Findings ....................................................................................................................................................... 73

Appendices: Poems by Samuel Beckett ............................................................................................................ 76

Works Cited .................................................................................................................................................. 110

Index ............................................................................................................................................................. 113

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Foreword

This study tries to describe the deconstructive approach of Beckett towards the motifs, language and

imagery in his poems to support Derrida’s claim regarding Beckett’s works being self-deconstructive in

an interview with Derek Attridge. Beckett has questioned the definition of each of the motifs of time,

death, identity, love, language and imagery in his poems by finding their being a supplement to their

opposite, and the undecidability in their nature, or elaborating on them in a way that they can be labeled

with the terminology of Derrida, although he did not use these terms.

The first chapter is an introduction to the case study and methods used in this study. In the second

chapter self-deconstructiveness in referring to the motifs of time, death, identity and love is discussed.

The third chapter elaborates on self- deconstructive language of the poems; it is divided into “Poetics of

Failure” and “Translation as Impossible and Necessary”. Under the first section repetition, shattered

syntax, silence, and music are discussed. The second section describes the deconstructive translation

methods of Beckett. The fourth chapter is dedicated to imagery and its being either related to a place

between microcosm and macrocosm, or equivocal with many signifieds, even if it is only related to one

of the two realms of inside or outside worlds. The last chapter sums up all the ideas and findings of the

research.

Herewith, I would like to thank my family for their life-time support, and my professors, especially Dr

Amir Ali Nojoumian and Dr Jalal Sokhanvar, for sharing with me open-heartedly their time and

knowledge throughout this study. I hope this work can be a satisfactory response to their efforts.

November 2010 Leila Samadi Rendy

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Chapter One: Introduction

General Background

Beckett was born in Foxrock, Dublin. He would later insist that he was born on Good Friday, 13 April

1906, although his birth certificate puts the date a month later. The Becketts were of French Huguenot

descent and, after a distinguished career at Trinity College, Dublin, he was to spend much of his life in

France. His cricketing prowess earned him a mention in Wisden (the only Nobel Prize winner there),

while he topped his year in modern languages. In 1928, he was appointed to an exchange lectureship in

Paris, where he met and helped James Joyce before returning to TCD in 1930.

A critical study of Marcel Proust (1931) pointed to an academic career, but Beckett chose to

become a full-time writer. He travelled widely, living rather precariously, before settling in

Montparnasse in Paris in 1937. His comic novel Murphy was published in 1938. He also met Suzanne

Dumesnil, when she helped him to hospital after a street stabbing; they were to marry in 1961. Beckett

was in Dublin at the outbreak of World War II, but “preferred France at war to Ireland at peace”. He

worked for the French Resistance, narrowly escaped the Gestapo, then moved to unoccupied France,

where he wrote his novel Watt.

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In 1947, he returned to Paris, where within two years he wrote his trilogy of novels. Molloy,

Malone Dies and The Unnamable, and the play Waiting for Godot. By now, he was writing in French,

then translating into English. Godot had its first production in 1953, and its success made the reclusive

Beckett an international figure. In this innovative tragi-comedy, the tramps Vladimir and Estragon

await someone they have never met and who may not exist. “If I knew who Godot was,” said Beckett,

“I would have said so in the play”. Other bleakly comic plays followed: Endgame and Happy Days.

Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, but shunned the presentation ceremony.

He died in Paris on 22 December 1989.

Beckett's work is stark, fundamentally minimalist, and according to some interpretations deeply

pessimistic about the human condition. He is mostly known for his dramas, novels, and short fictions,

but his poetry is of significance too. Beckett himself formed a low opinion of his youthful verse which

he described as "showing off", yet he kept it in print. One reason may have been that he began as a poet

and, in a manner commoner in France than in England, continued to think of himself as such, even after

he had virtually abandoned poetry for prose. It cannot be said that Beckett is a great poet but the poems

embody all the themes of his outstanding prose writings: love, time, individuality, death, emptiness of

life and as a result emptiness of language are some main themes in Beckett’s works in general, and

specially his poems.

The poems are occasionally discussed by the critics, but his art in general has been the concern

of most of the philosophers and critics of the age. However what is still surprising is that Jacques

Derrida, one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century and the well known founder of

Deconstruction, never wrote anything on Beckett, although they seem so close in ideas about life and

language.

Derrida is a contemporary French philosopher who inaugurated the school of deconstruction.

Deconstructionism, a body of ideas closely associated with post-structuralism and post-modernism, is a

strategy of analysis that has been applied primarily to linguistics, literature, and philosophy. Derrida

published three major works in 1967 which introduced his radical approach to texts: Speech and

Phenomena, Of Grammatology, and Writing and Differance. His greatest influence has been in

philosophy and literary criticism in the United States where the above works were translated and

published in the 1970's.

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In 1930, Jacques Derrida was born to Sephardic Jewish parents in Algeria. After military

service in France, he began his studies in philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris in 1952.

Derrida attended Harvard on scholarship in 1956-57. He was a lecturer in philosophy at the Sorbonne

in Paris from 1960-1964, then he was professor of philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure from

1965-1984. Derrida was the founding director of the College International de Philosophie in Paris, and

was most recently the directeur d'etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

For more than a decade, beginning in 1975, Derrida lectured regularly in the United States at Johns

Hopkins, Yale, Cornell, and the University of California at Irvine. Derrida's ideas inspired the critical

skepticism associated with the so called Yale School of deconstruction (Carrigan 1). He died in

October 2004.

Jacques Derrida's main concern was to critique metaphysics and its impact on the theory and

practice of philosophy and writing. He rejected two main characteristics of Western philosophy:

meaning is grounded in metaphysical presence, and time is oriented to its end (Craig 2).

In his interview with Derek Attridge, Jacques Derrida once claimed that Beckett's writing was

already so “self-deconstructive” that there was not much left to do. Derrida had already stated that

Beckett's texts make the limits of language tremble. Referring briefly to Beckettian composition,

rhetoric, construction and rhythm, even in his most “decomposed” works, Derrida called them

“remainders” of a thematic exhausted. This is important in light of the fact that this is the only instance

of Derrida's comment on such a widely-discussed writer as Beckett.

Derrida claimed, in that interview, that he felt too close to Beckett and attributed this closeness

to how they wrote in a foreign language. But apart from this seemingly apparent identification, he

stated some crucial words about the ambivalent function of nihilism: "a certain nihilism is both interior

to metaphysics (the final fulfillment of metaphysics, Heidegger would say) and then, already, beyond.

With Beckett, the two possibilities are in the greatest proximity and competition. He is nihilist and he is

not nihilist." To capture an object of study in such an impossible situation is typical of Derrida's

analysis. In deconstructing a concept, Derrida usually questions the validity of binary opposition that

are so much internalized by people that they are mostly taken for granted. Seizing a concept, whatever

it is, in a moment when it both exists and does not exist; Derrida refuses the idea of binary oppositions

and reaches a moment of undecidability. This is the general way that his deconstruction works. Again,

in the light of Derrida's notion of how Beckett makes the limits of language tremble, one can simply

read the famous allegory of wall, which is described by Beckett as an explanation of how his texts

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work. Beckett once had stated that he was like a man at a wall who was laboriously pressing his head

against the wall in order to get beyond it. He had proposed that the only possibility for such a man to

get beyond the wall is that the wall moved a little further. The undecidable state of being/non- being,

which is crucial to Derrida in deconstruction, also constitutes a central part of Beckett's oeuvre.

When Derrida confesses to his silence about Beckett's work, he disapproves of transcending or

reducing Beckett's work to any philosophical idea. Derrida's silence with regard to Beckett could be

taken as his critique of the very idea of “Beckett industry”. Beckett's work escapes all intellectual

reformulations. He calls it the “academic malady.” This is also evident in his opposing to the idea of

representation in his interview with Georges Duthuit. He has suggested there that the artist should be

concerned with his medium. This is exactly what he does in his work. In fact, by creating a non-

language, he creates an “other” for the language itself in his work. Proposing his poetics of failure,

Beckett could be seen as having created a language that never goes beyond itself to express or to

represent an idea. His language is self-referential because literature, in his view is run out of ideas and

tools to express ideas. “Beckett industry” has actively forgotten this and continues to unveil Beckett, by

resorting to the concerns imposed by any age on the critic. This passion of unveiling to cultivate

Beckett's field with “meaning” is the opposite of what he wanted to accomplish: creating art from

sterility.

This research seeks to show correspondences between Derrida's conceptions and Beckett's

motifs; affinities between their treatment of language and its relation to the reality. Beckett’s art is

delogocentric according to Jennifer Martin, because logos neither as speech and language, nor as logic

are the centers of his works, and poems are not exceptions (14). According to Derrida, the solution to

the "quandary" of the existential vertigo that is caused from anti-foundationalism or the lack of reliable

truth in life would be to revel in a "Nietzchean affirmation." That is, to view the destruction of

metaphysics, of foundationalism, not as stemming from a loss of center but possessing a non-center:

"This affirmation then determines the non-center otherwise than as loss of center. And it plays the

game without security" (Grammatology 80).

Another aim of this research is focusing on Beckett’s poetry which is not less self-

deconstructive than his other works, but less appreciated. His novels or dramas are so discussed but his

poetry is practically put aside. There are a few articles and just one book (Samuel Beckett: Poet and

Critic by Harvey) on his poems, but libraries on his prose. Of course it is because of the immaturity of

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his poems comparing to his prose, and the relative difficulty in access to some poems, due to the

abandonment of reprinting by the poet (the researcher has collected all the English and French poem

and translated the French ones which are not translated by the author or the others into English, and

attached to this research for the ease of reference of the reader). But it does not mean that they lack the

main concerns of Beckett and any significance.

Beckett's fame—coupled with the Nobel Prize in Literature that he won in 1969 and which he

and his wife considered to be a “catastrophe”—meant that academic interest in his life and work grew,

creating eventually something of a “Beckett industry”. Other writers also started to seek out Beckett.

The reception of Samuel Beckett's texts has from the start been an international business. During his

lifetime, Beckett's peculiar status as an Irish writer who lived most of his adult life in France, writing in

both English and French, translated into dozens of languages, and staged in dozens of countries,

marked him out as a thoroughly international writer. His work has generated one of the most

voluminous international libraries of critical commentary on any author in the history of world

literature. Turnover in Beckett critical industry is now so high that compelling bibliographies by

country of production has become not only a practical possibility but also an academic necessity. In

this “Beckett Industry”, a lot of philosophers and critical thinkers turned to Beckett's work to analyze.

Indeed, Beckett was mostly referred to by thinkers who read his work in favor of their theories. It is

noteworthy that the most influential thinkers of the 20th century have commented on his work:

Theodore W. Adorno, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Wolfgang

Iser, Julia Kristeva and many others, except for Derrida who has just mentioned in his interview with

Attridge his closeness or wish to closeness to Beckett.

Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic by Lawrence Harvey is the main resource for the study of

Beckett’s poetry, as it is the only book completely dedicated to this subject. A close reading of all the

poems is included in this book, relating the themes to the other works of Beckett. Although readings

are not in light of deconstruction, but because of Beckett’s work being self-deconstructive, most of the

topics are in line with the concern of this research.

Richard Lane, in Beckett and Philosophy, examines and interrogates the relationships between

Samuel Beckett's works and contemporary French and German thought. There are two wide-ranging

overview chapters by Richard Begam (Beckett and Postfoundationalism) and Robert Eaglestone

(Beckett via Literary and Philosophical Theories), and individual chapters on Beckett, Derrida,

Foucault, Deleuze, Badiou, Merleau-Ponty, Adorno, Habermas, Heidegger and Nietzsche. The

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collection takes a fresh look as issues such as postmodern and poststructuralist thought in relation to

Beckett studies, providing useful overview chapters and original essays. The most important part of this

book for the purpose of this research is the chapter on Derrida in which the writer focuses on the "edges

of language" which is in turn discussed here in light of the "displacements of the limits of language".

Paul Davis's Beckett and Eros, Death of Humanism is the first to propose a “mythopoetics of

sex” with which to explore Beckett's work as a whole. The decade since Beckett's death has seen new

interests in the erotic sweeping through our culture, acting in uneasy counterpoint to its established

humanistic infrastructure and opening new questions about the significance of sexuality. Surprisingly

or not, Beckett has startling further light to throw on the erotic phenomenon variously but insistently

recognized in our time. The last chapter of this book " That Unheeded Neither (neither)" offers an

interpretation of the poem "neither" on the basis of the notion of desire which according to this study is

a shaping undecidable element in Beckett's characters. The overall importance of this book to this

research is the way it places Beckett in an anti-humanist position, which is a poststructuralist and

deconstructionist project.

There are some few articles on Beckett’s poetry as well, which are will be used in this work.

Besides, some books by Derrida or on the concept of Deconstruction like Stocker’s Routledge

Philosophy Guide Book to Derrida on Deconstruction and Royle’s Deconstructions will be employed

in this study. The primary sources of this research will be the related books of Derrida to this subject

and Beckett’s collections of poems, as well as a few prose writings of him which are close in form and

content to the poems (for example Unnamable and Disjecta).

This book consists of five chapters three of which are considered as main chapters which

elaborate on the poems of Beckett supporting their being self-deconstructive: the poet deconstructs

some general motifs of life, language and images in the poems.

The second chapter is on the poetry of Beckett and his “Self-deconstructive Motifs” including

“Time”, “Death”, “Identity”, and “Love”. Time heads never-ending end, it is repetitive and leads to

purgatory and waiting, as man is always in the beginning of his way, and the proper time for him to

take an action in his life is always to come. This is what Derrida defines as différance. Death is the state

of silence and paralysis, which is both desired and undesired, and can be experienced in the life. This

deconstructs the binary opposition between life and death. The threshold of them shifts but it cannot be

really passed, and man is always on this threshold. Identity of man is always on the threshold too: the

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threshold of the selfhood and otherness. Even love has a threshold nature as the man always stands on

the borderline of true love and pretentious or physical love. They are supplementary and cannot be

separated from each other.

The third chapter is entitled “Self-deconstructiveness of Language”: This research will focus

on the language itself as the main source of the undecidability of the text, through “Poetics of Failure”

which is characteristic of Beckett's writing and includes “Reductive Variations to Say the Same Thing”

or repetition, “Shattered Syntax”, “Silence”, and “Music.” The originality an experience or a word

dissolves in the several repetitions, but this does not happen exactly in Beckett’s art, any repeated word

or idea is new as its context changes. Any repeated thing is new besides being old. This is

deconstructing of the definition of repetition. Shattered syntax of the poems leads to the lack of closure

and many readings. Besides, through this reduced syntax, the poet takes the language to its edge,

although it cannot pas it as it is impossible. No matter how minimalistic the syntax is, it is still

language, and is rhetorical. But it is rhetoric against rhetoric, against itself. The silence which is desired

in some poems is at the same time undesirable as it means non-being. Even when desired, silence is

unattainable, as there is no way out of language. Music is the most powerful way of utterance. It is

beyond language and translation and is universal. Beckett gets to music in his poems through

repetition; he uses words as musical notes, he uses language against itself.

In this chapter Beckett’s translation of his own poems or the poems of the other poets will be

discussed as well. Beckett’s translated texts are new and original texts besides being the translation of a

text. He considers his translation of the others as his own works, and by sequence his translation of

himself is a new poetic creation of him. It is due to the impossibility of a mere translation and its

necessity discussed by Derrida.

The Fourth chapter is “Self-deconstructiveness of Imagery” in which “Equivocal Images” and

their belonging to a world “Between Two Worlds: Microcosm/ Macrocosm” will be discussed. The

reader cannot decide whether the speaker of the poems is talking of his inner world or the world

outside, and share the undecidability of him. Even in the poems that the reader can decisively tell the

speaker is talking of the world outside, the many implications of a single image leaves him with aporia.

Last chapter is dedicated to summing up the results of the analyses and getting to findings

regarding the main focuses of the study. The relationship between the ideas of Derrida and Beckett, as

he has shown them in his poetry will be clarified generally in this chapter, while in the previous

chapters it has been done in detail, using examples from the works of these two great figures.

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This five-chapter research is based on library and electronic sources. As it is discussed above,

the approach for my analyses will be based on deconstruction. For the purpose of deconstructing texts,

it is assumed, at first, that they rely on some metaphysical framework which is inclined to establish a

hierarchical order within the text in the form of binary oppositions of values, a hierarchy of value or

truth which allows the writer to exclude from the field of discourse those connotations or meanings

which do not accord with the privileged terms. The deconstruction goes on, then, to reverse the

hierarchy by finding evidences in the text which allow this reversal. At last, this newly established

hierarchy is, in turn, broken up in order to prove the indeterminacy of meaning or unavailability of any

ultimate meanings in the text which is subject to the effects of différance in language and aporias of

discourse. To reveal a text's undecidability is to show that the meaning of the text is really an

indefinite, undecidable, plural, conflicting array of possible meanings. In this case self-

deconstructiveness of Beckett's poetry is the interest of study and it will be shown that Beckett's text

provides different interpretations and paradoxical aspects in it. These interpretations and circumstances

conflict with each other which lead to more interpretations. For instance, majority of critics believe that

Time is one of the main concerns. Time is introduced as both healer (through habit) and killer (through

memory). This logic of "both A and not-A" is extremely important to undermine the foundations of

binary oppositions at work in the text. According to Tyson in Critical Theory Today

In deconstruction, undecidability of the text does not mean that the reader is unable to choose

among possible interpretations. And it does not mean that the text cannot decide as to what it

wants to say. Rather, it means that the text and the reader, alike, are inextricably bound within

language's dissemination of meanings. That is, reader and text are interwoven threads in the

perpetually working loom of language. Specific meanings are just moments of meaning that

give way, inevitably to more meanings. (130)

Every literary text lends itself to deconstruction as there are “black holes” and contradictions in them

all. According to J. Hillis Miller the four important things a deconstructionist mentions in reading a text

are:

1. The idiosyncrasy of texts and knowing it singular

2. The details

3. Finding a problem and contradiction or, according to Derrida, a “black hole”, in the text (It differs

from one critic to the other).

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4. Speech act theory, which sees a performative aspect in literature and asks for a responsible reading

(Miller 171-185).

So there is not any methodology to apply Deconstruction to literature. There are just the few

mentioned points to be considered, which Lois Tyson states should be characterized in four steps to be

taken to reveal the undecidability in a text and so apply deconstruction to it:

Note all the various interpretations the text seems to offer

1. show the ways in which these interpretations conflict with one another

2. show how these conflicts produce still more interpretations, which produce still more conflicts, which

produce still more interpretations

3. Use step #1, #2, and #3 to argue for the text’s undecidability. (135)

Therefore, in this research the poems of Beckett will be read in this way and its being deconstructive

will be shown. It is not a difficult work as Beckett has exaggerated the deconstructive themes and has

done the duty of critic himself. But still his ideas are implied in the poetic language which should be

paraphrased.

Another method taken up here is to establish a correspondence between Derrida's terminology of

deconstruction and Beckettian motifs: For instance, correspondences between Beckett's “purgatory”

and Derrida's “abyss” or “aporia”; between Beckett's ethics of waiting and Derrida's notion of

différance. In this way, poetics of failure, as described by Beckett, as an eternal recurrence of ending

the same thing, could be read as the postponement of the ultimate meaning and promises to coming of

"other". Each waiting is different and makes a kind of insatiable desire in the waiter, but as the coming

is always deferred it undergoes the matter of différance. Waiting is a kind of Death in life and by this

Beckett finds the binary opposition of Death/Life vicious as they are supplement of each other.

But it has to be warned repeatedly through this research that these correspondences are not to confirm

that Beckett uses the same tools as Derrida to criticize “metaphysics of presence” in Western culture.

Definition of Key Terms

Aporia

From the Greek, meaning, literally, “the absence of a passage”, and hence a perplexing difficulty or

state of being at a loss, aporia denotes in rhetoric a figure in which the speaker or writer expresses

doubt about how or where to begin a discourse, or how to overcome a particular problem or obstacle.

For deconstructive criticism, it is precisely around such moments of doubt or apparently unresolvable

14

problems that reading orients itself. For Derrida, as for the criticism of Paul de Man, it is these textual

gaps or stumbling-blocks to which we must pay attention (Sim 120).

Binary oppositions

The use of binary opposition in analyzing phenomena is highly characteristic of structuralism, and one

of the aspects of its methodology that is most vigorously attacked by post-structuralist critics, thus in

Lèvi-Strauss, “nature” and “culture” are set in opposition to each other as mutually exclusive

categories, such that given examples of human behavior must belong to one or other category— but not

both. Lèvi-Strauss proceeds to run into problems with the incest taboo, which he is forced to admit

does seem to belong to both categories. For Derrida, this is an admission that calls into question the

whole structuralist project, the methodology of which is seen to be faulty. Poststructuralists like

Derrida also consider that the principle of binary opposition (either one thing or its opposite number)

depends on a notion of fixed identity that no longer tenable; as far as they are concerned, identity is a

much more fluid phenomenon than structuralists would like to believe (Sim 127).

Différance

Against the metaphysics of presence, deconstruction brings a (non)concept called différance. This

French neologism is, on the deconstructive argument, properly neither a word nor a concept; it names

the non-coincidence of meaning both synchronically (one French homonym means "differing") and

diachronically (another French homonym means "deferring"). Because the resonance and conflict

between these two French meanings is difficult to convey tersely in English, the word différance is

usually left untranslated. In simple terms, this means that rather than privileging commonality and

simplicity and seeking unifying principles (or grand teleological narratives, or overarching concepts,

etc.) deconstruction emphasizes difference, complexity, and non- self-identity (Carrigan 7).

Erasure

Erasure is a deconstructionist technique whereby a word or term is used, but what it commits one to (its

meaning, as well as the theory of meaning lying behind it) is denied, or, as Jacques Derrida puts it,

placed “under erasure” (sous rature).This enable Derrida to claim that he can use the language of

Western philosophy without that use committing him to a belief in its concepts or any of its principles.

15

The practice is derived from Martin Heidegger, who in Zur Seinsfrage used the word “being” with a

line drawn through it, in order to signal that he did not want to be drawn into debates about the concept,

since that would imply his acceptance of Western philosophy’s metaphysical assumptions about being.

Erasure is one of the ways Derrida attempts to answer what has become a standard criticism of his

work: that he relies on language to put his arguments across, while simultaneously claiming that

language is unable and meaning indeterminate. Critics have pointed out that Derrida’s critique of

language could not be understood unless language and meaning were at least relatively stable. Seen

from that latter perspective, the technique of erasure is something of a confidence trick (Sim 137).

Hymen

The word hymen refers to the interplay between inside and outside. The hymen is the membrane of

intersection where it becomes impossible to distinguish whether the membrane is on the inside or the

outside. And in the absence of the hymen (as in, once the hymen is penetrated), the distinction between

inside and outside disappears. Thus, in a way, the hymen is neither inside nor outside, and both inside

and outside (Sim 145).

Iterability

The necessary repeatability of any item experienced as meaningful, which at the same time can never

be repeated exactly since it has no essence that could remain unaffected by the potentially infinite

contexts (which are always contexts within contexts…) into which it could be grafted ( Derrida, Acts

18).

Logocentrism

From Plato to Kant, philosophers and theologians have struggled for a solution which adequately

solved the riddle of the relationship between the noumena and the phenomena, between the spiritual

world and the material world, between an-other-world and world. Derrida's approach was radically

different. His approach was a brilliant, though flawed, attack on the very foundations of philosophy.

Rather than attempt to sort out how it was that in any sense the other-world was present in this world,

or how occupants of this world might have some knowledge about the other-world, Derrida claimed

that the other-world (if it actually was) and this world are irreducibly different. He also argued that

constituents of the other-world should not have a privileged status in this world (Carrigan 10).

16

Deconstruction identifies in the Western philosophical tradition a "logocentrism" or

"metaphysics of presence" (also known as phallogocentrism) which holds that speech-thought (the

logos) is a privileged, ideal, and self-present entity, through which all discourse and meaning are

derived. This logocentrism is the primary target of deconstruction (Sim 169).

Pharmakon

The word pharmakon refers to the play between cure and poison. It derives from the ancient Greek

word, used by Plato in Phaedrus and Phaedo, which had an undecidable meaning which could be

translated to mean anything ranging from a drug, recipe, spell, medicine, or poison (Sim 183).

Supplement

According to Derrida, the Western idea of the supplement has within it the idea that a thing that has a

supplement cannot be truly "complete in itself". If it were complete without the supplement, it shouldn't

need, or long-for, the supplement. The fact that a thing can be added-to to make it even more "present"

or "whole" means that there is a hole (which Derrida called an originary lack) and the supplement can

fill that hole. The metaphorical opening of this "hole" Derrida called invagination. From this

perspective, the supplement does not enhance something's presence, but rather underscores its absence

(Sim 192).

Trace

Derrida defines trace as what a sign differs/defers from. It is the absent part of the sign's presence. In

other words, through the act of différance, a sign leaves behind a trace, which is whatever is left over

after everything present has been accounted for (Sim 200).

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Chapter Two: Self-Deconstructive Motifs

Beckett and Derrida questioned the definition of common motifs like time, death, identity, and love.

They expressed the impossibility hidden in different sides of these issues. They have both shown the

contradiction in each of these themes, which make them impossible, and have expressed man’s

inevitable compromising with living the impossible. The human condition in the world has been the

main concern of these two great thinkers. To them man is always standing on the threshold of any

opposition in life. There is no priority and hierarchy. There can be no decision and good choice. The

only thing is undecidability and the ability to tolerate it, which is close to impossible. This constantly

elaborating on the contradictions in the world and giving no clue and answer to the problem, as there is

not any, leads the reader of these two to aporia. Their works deconstruct both the subjects it is about,

and itself: they are conscious of the contradictions in their own beliefs and they express it freely. The

difference between Beckett and other writers, whose works are deconstructed by Derrida and other

deconstructionalists—although Derrida does not believe in this term—is that they are unaware of the

paradoxes in their works and ideas, and the critic sheds light on it. There are some gaps in their works,

which show the authors are unconsciously deconstructing the motifs in their work. The critic finds the

gaps and through them gets to the core of author’s belief and explains it. Beckett does the job of the

critic himself. That is why Derrida agrees with the claim of Derek Attridge concerning self-

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deconstructiveness of Beckett’s works. Below, this idea will be discussed in the motifs of time, death,

identity, and love in the poems of Beckett.

Time

One should not necessarily flee or condemn circularity as one would a bad repetition, a vicious

circle, a regressive or sterile process. One must, in a certain way of course, inhabit the circle,

turn around in it, live there a feast of thinking and the gift, the gif of thinking. (Derrida, Given

Time 9)

What is time? It does not have any specific essence, it is not a thing to be given or taken, although we

use these verbs for it, as Derrida discusses in his “Given Time.” In addition, in “Apories” he claims

that time (present) is non-existing and impossible. All we have is the dream of future and the memory

of the past, and the present time is just the “Hymen” of these two. On the other hand, what is past or

future but the stream of the non-existing present?

The problem is not just in defining time; in fact, this indefinable subject is the most dominant

issue in the life of man. Time is treated as both killer and healer: the adjectives Beckett has attributed to

time in his critical essay Proust. The womb is the grave due to the passage of time: after a while, the

one in the womb is to live in the world and at last die and sleep in a grave. This life-giving time is at

the same time death-giving. This is what Derrida calls “Pharmakon” function.

Another idea about time is its repetitive nature. Drive of life is the repetition, or as Derrida puts

it “Repetition Compulsion”, returning to, and restoring the origin, which is death and ignorance

(Derrida, Post Card 335-338). Death and birth are equal to Derrida. Beckett’s idea about time is the

same, and proofs for this claim will be brought from his poems.

Besides, one of the other issues appearing in this uncertainty in defining time, and consequently

life, is Paralysis. Finding this definition is a matter of Différance and makes waiting inevitable. No

certain answer can be found for the question of what time and life is, and what one should do not

knowing the meaning life, thus man encounters the aporias of purgatory and undecidability. Man does

not know when is the “best time” to do something and take a step in his life, so he is always waiting for

that proper time “to come.”

Beckett’s first piece of published writing is his poem “Whoroscope” with the main theme of

time. This shows that the subject of time is of great importance to the poet. In that poem, Descartes’

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escape from the end of his time of living and its impossibility is elaborated. He was always scared of

his horoscope and never revealed his date of birth because he was afraid of the prediction of his time of

death and its coming true–although he wanted to show off that he does not believe in metaphysics.

Forgetting it does not change the authority of time over man’s life; there is no escape from death.

In the above-mentioned poem, “Whoroscope”, the pharmakonic essence of time is discussed. In

the poem egg and Descartes’ habit of eating it between 8 to 11days after its being laid is repeated

several times. He used to believe that before 8 days, the egg is not ready to be eaten and after about 11

days, it goes bad. Therefore, the very time that makes it good is the time that corrupts it. Besides, one

should always wait for the proper time to come in his life for everything.

Beckett speaks of the repetitiveness of time in his poems. To focus on “Whoroscope”, the idea

of egg as both grave and womb conveys the idea of time’s repeating itself and that the beginning and

the end of man’s life is the same. Even while he considers himself in the prime of his youth, he is

imprisoned in a world, which resembles a womb, a grave, an egg.

Another example of the repetitiveness of time and life from Beckett’s poems is in “Home

Olga”. This poem is about Joyce and by putting together the initial letter of each line, one can get to his

name even. In this poem Beckett in a ridiculing and comic manner writes “Yesterday shall be

tomorrow/ riddle me that my rapparee”; time can repeat itself and there is no riddle and doubt in that

according to him.

In “Death of A.D.” the speaker complains of the passage of time and death. The poet is

mourning a friend whose name’s initial is A.D. But A.D. reminds us of the time after Christ. Therefore,

time is dead to the speaker too. The speaker thinks of getting rid of time, which is impossible:

being there in fleeing not and fleeing being there

bent towards the confession of expiring time

Death is the crime of time, and it is repeating itself, like the lives of man. Each going has a return and

this vicious circle of life lasts forever: “the unpardonable crime of time/gripping old wood the witness

of departures/witness of returns.” As Derrida puts it in Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, “Time would

always be a process or a movement in the form of the circle or sphere” (8). There is no way out of the

circle and any part where one calls the end is the beginning point and vise versa.

In “Cascando”, first it seems that the poet refers to a final end as impossible and inevitable. This

end is not the end of time or even one’s time, it is the end of the time of the illusion of the perpetual

love.

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saying again there is a last

even of last times . . .

a last even of last times of saying

if you do not love me I shall not be loved

if I do not love you I shall not love

This becomes clearer when the poem gets to its end and the speaker clearly declares that he is not in the

mentioned illusion any more and knows that he may be in love with someone else, although it is not

desired for him.

terrified again

of not loving

of loving and not you

of being loved and not by you

This poem is another example of the two opposite and contradicting functions of time. Time

which has given man the chance of love and made in him the belief in the eternal pure love, shows him

after a while that such a thing does not exist and that love is just “thud of the old plunger/pestling the

unalterable/whey of words.” So time is the source of the marvelous illusions and painful

disillusionments.

In “Thither” the repetition of the limited words of the poem, alongside the content, which is

about the repetitiveness of nature and man’s pain and desire, show Beckett’s belief in the circularity of

life and time.

First Stanza Third Stanza

Thither

A far cry

For one

So little

Fair daffodils

March then

Then thence

Daffodils

Again

March then

Again

A far cry

Again

For one

So little

As indicated in this table, most of the words and phrases in the third stanza are the repetition of

that of the first ones. The second stanza is “there then/ there then.” This stanza has the repetitive

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essence as well. The only thing which is not repeated is “fair”—“thence” is not repeated but “then” is

so close in meaning, so it can be considered as repeated. May be the speaker wants to suggest that the

only thing which occurs once is man’s feeling the fairness and beauty by heart. The second time man

finds love and beauty, he does not have all the feeling he had in his first encounter, as Beckett has

mentioned here and in First Love.

The poem constantly refers to a specific time and place and someone whose cry comes from far

away. It shows the desire in the speaker to get to a certainty about time and place in life and his need

for “another voice”, which is always to come and is different from others, the voice of someone who

can give life and time a meaning according to Derrida in his Cinders. However, all these quests are

repetitive and useless, but the speaker cannot stop searching for a meaning. Finding a meaning for time

is aporiaic to him.

The poet has meditated on “a last even of last times” in “Cascando”; the speculation becomes

reality at “Dieppe”, as the ebb tide rolls in and out again. In the other three poems of Quatre Poemes

the named location disappears, but the “threshold” situation (“these long shifting thresholds” as Beckett

calls them) remains. The third poem envisages a transfer from a situation in which (as Fin de Partie

puts it) “quelque chose suit son cours” to one which can be apprehended and lived through as an

“instant”. But time cannot be divorced from space, as the translation of “le temps d’une porte” (“the

space of a door”) obliquely admits, and as the fourth poem makes clear. The reiteration of a quotidian

reality “where to be lasts but an instant” is accompanied by a heavily rhetorical plea for external reality,

general and particular: “what would I do without this world . . . without this wave . . . without this

silence . . . without this sky.” The rhetoric is suspiciously fulsome and is exploded by the bitterness of

the second half of the poem. But the structure is not as simple as this; there is, in the first half, a gradual

move away from the phenomenal towards the eternal. Wave and sky seem to be less a part of an

externally perceived reality than a reality created by the recording consciousness. Only a world behind

what the second poem calls “ce rideau de brume qui recule,” a world that only gives one back the

image of oneself (because it can do no more) but which constantly asserts itself as outside oneself

(because it can do no less), is desired by the poet. Without an apocalypse (“this wave where in the end /

body and shadow are engulfed”) life would be meaningless repetition, with an eye constantly seeking

outside itself an image of solace that can only have been spun from inside itself. Thus the perception of

space (and of objects in space) becomes “convulsive.” As a corollary, the imagining of a

figure/companion who might bring solace involves the poet in facing and giving oblique utterance to

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his essential loneliness. The minimal distortion of vision is better expressed in the French because a

more neutral (though more rigid) syntax allows identities to remain shadowy, whereas in English the

dislocations of subject and object are felt to be forced (Pilling, 179).

The last poem of the first French collection is another good example of the repetitiveness of

time from the ancient time to the present.

even in the cavern sky and earth

and one by one the ancient voices

from beyond the grave

and slowly the same light . . .

and the same laws

as not so long ago

The “ancient voices” go back beyond the “outre-tombe” of Chateaubriand to the plains of Enna where

Proserpine was ravished by Pluto. But the reassurance of invoking classical myth proves only a

momentary bulwark for the microcosm. For the old dichotomies persist in the cavernous depths of the

self; there is the same tension of sky and earth, the same light that consumes the darkness, the same

laws of attraction and repulsion. Then, in a ricorso more daunting than that at the beginning of

“Dieppe”, or the one in the central section of “Cascando”, there is always the “bouche d'ombre”:

slowly from far off extinguishing

Proserpine and Atropos

It is an even more uncertain void than the mouth of hell (Pilling, 177).

A very clear example of purgatory and paralysis in Beckett is his poem “La Mouche” (“the

fly”). In this poem, the poet is even unable to decide whether he is to kill a disturbing fly or not.

Derrida discusses this in his Aporie “Finis”, Mourir-S’Attendre Aux “limites de la Verite” .

In the third poem of the first French collection lying in bed, awaiting his satisfaction, the poet

projects himself into the climax of the near future:

to be there jawless toothless

where the pleasure of loss is lost

together with the scarcely inferior

one of gain

Here the speaker even cannot enjoy, and waits for another time to come at which he can be satisfied.

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In the fourth poem of the first French collection, “Ascension”, speaker uses the phrase “always

too young”. This indicates that according to him no time is proper; one should always wait for the

proper time to come in his life (Harvey, 188).

In the first poem of the second French collection, Beckett writes:

you would want me coming from A to B I cannot

I cannot exit I am in a trackless country

yes yes it is a beautiful thing you have there a

good beautiful thing

what is it that does not ask me more questions

spiral dust of instants what is it that is the same

Here again the poet speaks of the repetitiveness of time, its being indefinable and the purgatory it leads

to. The speaker is imprisoned in the loop of time and cannot escape from it; he even cannot make a

slight movement “from A to B.”

Therefore, according to Beckett, time is always repeating itself, and by sequence, man’s life is

like a loop and he is always standing at the beginning, which is the end at the same time. Time, which

has given man life, is the source of death to him too. Another important faculty Beckett finds in time is

its never being proper and leading man to an eternal waiting for the “proper time.” Derrida agrees with

all these claims as it is discussed above. Derrida, like Beckett, finds time pharmakonic, repetitive and

leading to waiting as a matter of différance. This shows the closeness of these two thinkers, of which

Derrida speaks in his interview with Attridge.

Death

and we know none we know nothing at all

the singing of the dead mouths dies

on the shore he traveled

there is nothing in crying

(Beckett, First Poem of the Second French Collection)

Death to Beckett is a part of daily life: everyone is dying from the very moment they begin to live in

the womb of his mother. This does not simply mean that he is getting closer to the time of his death, to

a border, but it shows that man is always on the threshold of life and death, so he is neither dead nor

alive, besides being both dead and alive at the same time. Life is “unknown” to Beckett, and therefore,

death as a part of it, is unknown too. The only thing he knows about death is that silence and lethargy

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are equal to death, the thing man always experiences, and even long for it. So every person in the world

is willing and at the same time scared of death, and Beckett is not an exception. Man has a love and

hate relation with death.

There are times when Beckett refers to death as a border and threshold of life and death, but he

does not talk about the territory of death. Crossing the river and getting to another shore, as he refers to

in “Malcoda”, is the end of floating on it, or standing on the bank of the river in the land of life. But

what is on the other side? He does not know. If death is lethargy, the passenger will remain at the other

shore in silence, just like what he did in the land of Life. He is still standing on the threshold, but it has

moved a little, as Beckett refers to in the so-called allegory of wall.

Derrida discusses about death in several essays and books and agrees with Beckett in his view

of death. For example, in his essay “Apories” he discusses that Death is passing the line, which is

impossible but a common fault. And where is this border? It is both in and out of life. At that place,

being and non-being are mingled and are supplementary for each other. To him life and death are

dependant to each other and each needs the other to be defined. Without a border between them, they

cannot be separated and defined so the border is necessary. But crossing the border is necessary too to

define the border. Thus, this crossing the line is necessary and impossible, as it is not a mere crossing

and getting far.

Therefore, there is affinity between the ideas of Beckett and Derrida in the subject of Death.

This will be supported by tracing the deconstructive issues about this subject in the poems of Beckett.

The third poem of the second French collection opens with the binary opposition of life and

death and throughout the poem it becomes clear that each of the two sides of this opposition is

dependant and inseparable from the other.

live dead my lonely season

read blank chrysanthemum

lively nests abandoned

mud of the leaves of April

beautiful days gray of frost

Besides every beautiful and lively scene, there exists the death reminding ugly image. The lonely

spring is the live season of death for the speaker; he finds loneliness as death. April is the life-giving

month of the year but besides the flowers and sunshine, the speaker finds mud and gray frost disturbing

this beauty. Life and death are mingled and the season, which is full of life, can be the month of death

for the lonely speaker.

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Three last poems of Echo’s Bones due to the death of Beckett’s father are about death. In

“Malacoda” the poet is talking about the image of death as sailing on a river in a boat the sailor of

which is the mythical figure, Malacoda, whose responsibility was to take the dead to the Underground

through the River of Hades. The phases of preparing a dead body for leaving the land of living people,

and mourning of the mother is shown with an affirmative and at the same time negating tone.

must it be it must be it must be

find the weeds engage them in the garden

hear she may see she need not

Death and mourning are inevitable and a law, but at the same time undesired and unnecessary. The

poem is full of the words and images, which shows the sorrow of the death of the beloved father and

husband. Death is evil and so far from life. The dead should leave to a land of demonic death and the

living will suffer their loss. This image of trip is again shown at the end of the poem.

all aboard all souls

half-mast aye aye

nay

The last line is the common phrase sailors shout when they want to ask everyone to get into the ship or

boat, and the response of the speaker at first is affirmative, “ aye”, but then negating, “nay”. Harvey in

Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic discusses this subject as follows:

The final ‘nay,’ set apart from the rest of the poem…, negates not only the preceding line but the

whole poem. There is no reason to lower the flag to half-mast in sign of mourning. Death is not

a penalty but a welcome release from cruelty of life. Thus “Malacoda” is an ambivalent title,

because for the dead man at least the end is not an evil but a blessing…In Beckett’s Humanistic

scheme, however, compassion is central, compassion not for the dead, but for the living, who

suffer in the earthly inferno of life. (112)

According to him, the poet negates his first belief concerning death as a sad end and sorrowful

mourning of the living. That is right, but this negation does not mean that the speaker has found a

solution for the problem of death and mourning, he is only doubtful. The strong effect of the last “nay”

is equal to the effect of the many words describing the horrible death and mourning, so the speaker is in

the situation of aporia in being mourner or not, in making a hierarchy out of the binary opposition of

life/death.

“Da tagte es” reinterprets the crucial awakening moment of Walther von der Vogelweide's

alba, “Nemt, frowe disen kranz” in terms of death, where Walther’s aim had been to show the

perfection of love destroyed by contact with harsh reality. Beckett allows the idea of a lovers’ parting

to remain behind the image of his father laid in a winding sheet in an open coffin (Pilling, 169). The

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major work of dislocation is carried out by the third line “who have no more for the land”, as can be

seen by omitting it and rearranging the order of lines:

the sheet astream in your hand 2

and the glass unmisted above your eyes 4

redeem the surrogate goodbyes 1

Sheet has the sexual connotation as well as its funeral and farewell ones. So may be Beckett plays with

the Renaissance usage of the word “die”, to refer both to death and to lovemaking. Thus death is a

unification and at the same time parting. If we want to take the image of the winding sheet a sexual

one, then the third line of the poem, “who have no more for the land”, and its clear death and departure

meaning is put beside the lovemaking one. This will suggest the temporality of love and at the same

time beauty of death, as no one can deny the beauty in the unification of the lovers.

The title of the poem means, “here comes the day”, so the dark idea of death and departure is in

contrast with the light which is brought by day, and brings the fancy ideas about life-giving day under

question. By doing so, Beckett shows that life and death are of the equal value in the supposed

hierarchy. Even if one wants to take physical love as killing love, as Beckett sometimes does with an

uncertainty, then the title will contradict it and give a positive meaning to it, as it does with the idea of

dark death. If we take death as a love making, as the Renaissance word would indicate, then title of the

poem will not be in contrast with the rest, as death has not any dark connotation. All of these ideas are

correct and suggested at the same time and choosing one of them is a mere aporia, and that is the same

with defining death, so by putting all these contrasting ideas together in this poem, Beckett wants to

shed a new light on the subject and show its undecidability.

The late French poem “Mort de A.D.” proves conclusively that his work is not entirely

solipsistic and self-regarding. In this poem, he envisages the state of death in paradoxical terms more

desperate even than those used to express physical pleasure:

thrust up against my old plank pock-marked with the black

of blindly mixed up days and nights

in being there in fleeing not and fleeing being there

bent towards the confession of expiring time

This meaningful death-in-life is compared with the intolerable passivity of being able to do nothing but

watch:

drinking down above the storm

the unpardonable crime of time

gripping old wood the witness of departures

witness of returns

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The concluding line, almost an afterthought, does nothing to compel us to regard it as optimistic; what

Beckett found “pernicious” in Proust is still symptomatic of the earthly condition here. The world, as

he was later to show in Imagination Dead Imagine, is “still proof against enduring tumult,” still

undeniably there, however threatened by the feelings of the mind (Pilling, 180).

Love is associated with death in Beckett’s art. Love, which is the liveliest part of each life, is

the closest to death as well. One of the best examples is the last poem of Quatre Poèmes, “I would like

my love to die”:

I would like my love to die

and the rain to be falling on the graveyard

and on me walking the streets

mourning the first and last to love me

There is another “version” of this poem, the French one, which ends with: “Mourning the one who

thought she loves me.” The variation in translation is to be discussed in the next chapter. Here this two

oppositions of “first and last to love me” and “one who thought she loves me” will be put vis-à-vis, as

the result of both of these two ideas about the beloved is the same thing, which is poet’s death wish for

the beloved. Are these two synonyms? It seems even vice versa, so how can two opposite things lead to

the same result? They are neither synonyms nor antonyms. This is an impossible situation. The other

question coming to mind is that why one should make such a wish for his beloved? The answer varies

with each of the two endings.

First, the experience of having the other dead means the experience of making the self eternal,

so in the wish made in the poem one can trace a kind of narcissism, sadism and self-centeredness. In

Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return of the Dead, Davis declares, “There

may be in the subject’s grief the traces of a sadistic triumph, because the loss of the object is also my

victory over it; its death serves to confirm the fact that I am still alive” (135). Therefore, there is a love

and hate relationship between the subject and object. Love and hate are found supplementary and

undecidable and the binary opposition of them is collapsed here.

Second, the speaker wants to sacrifice his happiness for a melancholy to show his love, which is

a masochistic act. He wants to pay the price of his happiness by mourning and melancholy. Mourning

is the price of friendship, so the masochist responsible speaker wants to pay the price of his happiness

by a big sorrow not to owe any thing. Beckett says, “The tears of the world are a constant quality. For

each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh." So he who

once have laughed with the beloved, as he does not want some other one pay the equivalent of it by his

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tears, wishes death for her beloved to be able to pay it himself. “So melancholy is not the consequence

of any event in the history of a friendship, rather it precedes all events, it is at the very least co-

extensive with friendship and perhaps even prior to it” (Davis, 147);

Third, by having his beloved dead, the speaker will always (as he is knows himself eternal) fix

her in his mind at the best time, which is the prime of their lives. This is again narcissistic and besides

sadistic. The girl is not unchangeable and eternal, so their love is in danger when she is alive, but by

death she becomes eternal and fixed in the memory of her lover and in the land of death, as Allan

Stoekl talks of in his introduction to Blanchot’s The Most High. There he finds the state of death as the

state of paralysis and unchangeablity. Therefore, love can be unchangeable too in the state of death.

The speaker does not want to experience new loves, and wants the love of his first beloved be the last,

but if she survives, it becomes impossible as he may not love her after a while, or even she may stop

loving him, so she should die to be eternally the love of the speaker. Besides, after the beloved’s death

the speaker brings her inside of himself and get to unification as Derrida claims in his lecture in the

memory of Louis Althusser and in Gift of Death. There Derrida characterizes this avoidance of

appropriation as an ethics of otherness, and he highlights the difficulty of maintaining such an ethics by

examining the paradoxical implications of the phrase "Every other (one) is every (bit) other." This

tautology (the rhetorical figure is made more effective in its original French, "Tout autre est tout autre")

suggests that the friend who has died maintains a singularity and uniqueness that is not only wholly

separate from the eulogist, but also wholly alien to the eulogist. So the unification is impossible but at

least he can get closer to his own identity in relation with the internalized other. The speaker needs the

eternal beloved as an eternal other, to be able to define himself, in his relation with her.

Fourth, by mourning the other, one is always mourning himself as he is to die once. This is an

early mourning for one’s not being eternal. Besides, as the speaker is so mingled with the other, and he

defines himself with her, loss of her is the loss of him by sequence, so wishing her death is like an idea

of suicide for the speaker. In The Haunted Subjects the writer refers to Derrida’s Béliers. Le Dialogue

ininterrompu: entre deux infinis, le poème and Politiques de l’amitiè :

Mourning is not only inherited in the friendship of self and other, it is equally inherited in the

subject’s self-relation. Its self-presence is fissured by its knowledge of its own death, so as it

mourns the other…it also mourns itself.(144)

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Mourning is the experience of living the death. Although life and death are mingled in man’s daily

routine, death of the other and mourning her leads to a feeling of experiencing death as through

melancholy one gets to a passivity and silence which is death itself to Beckett. Davis claims that

according to Derrida “Each time, the death of the other is a renewed death of the self, indeed it destroys

the world, completely and uncompromisingly…” (Davis, 129). There again he declares “[t]he subject

begins to identify with the dead beloved. But the melancholia which is now expressed is not the

subject’s grief over the lost object; rather it is what the subject imagines the object to be feeling over

the loss of its beloved” (134).

Fifth, according to Derrida, there is an unspeakable rule between two friends (and lovers) which

says each one of the two sides of the relationship is always worried about seeing the death of the other,

so it makes him less attentive to his presence. The thought of absence and loss shadows the presence,

so the sooner the death comes, the better they can pay attention to each other. “Derrida argues that

friendship is always bound up with mourning because, from its very beginnings, we know that friends

will be separated by death, that one will die before the other” (Davis,144).The survivor is more

attentive to the voices of his friends when they are dead than he was when they were living. This is

what Derrida calls “Terrifying Hypothesis”, as quoted in Haunted Subjects (Davis, 149): as long as the

girl is alive, the speaker cannot listen to her and be in a complete love with her, so she should die to be

heard and loved more.

In the first poem of the first French collection the speaker says, “with each the absence of life is

the same.” With each of this same others the speaker is living the absence of life, the trace and shadow

of life, rather than life itself. Life is not to be captured and defined completely. We can only get closer

to a definition by the use of a negative proof and knowing what life is not. But the absence of life is not

death, so there is not a binary opposition of Life/Death here, but rather there is Life/not-life. But this

not-life exists too as we use the verb “is” for it. So not-life does not mean non-being as such a thing

does not exist. Everything man has put in language is living and not- life and death are not exceptions.

So by the use of “absence of life” the author has deconstructed the binary oppositions of life/death and

life/not-life. Experiencing absence of love seems impossible but the speaker has done it and not even

once, he has undertaken it several times with several lovers but it has always been the same. Therefore

this experience is a possible impossible.

In the third poem of the first French collection as before (in Echo's Bones), meditation on what

precedes the moment of bliss affects the coherence of the poem, and it is only when he imagines

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himself at the heart of the mystery that the poem focuses itself with precision. The continuous contact

of love and death is characteristic ( Pilling, 173):

let her moisten

as long as she likes till the elegy

of shod horses' hooves still far from Les Halles

or the riff-raff's water crumbles in the pipes

or nothing more

let her moisten

perfect the excess

and come

with her idiot mouth with her hand formicating

the hollow bulk the hollow eye listening

to far-off tinkling scissor snips

Of the jettisoned poems “Yoke of Liberty” is clearly the best and one of Beckett's most successful

poetic ventures. He used the paradoxical title (from Dante's De Monarchia, II, i) in his first published

essay “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico. Joyce” to assist his articulation of “a Necessity that is not Fate . . . a

Liberty that is not Chance”. The context here is altogether more intimate, and very delicately handled.

There is a Chinese feel about the poem, with no sense of it degenerating into mere chinoiserie. Along

with other poems of the period, it suggests he had more to learn from Pound than Eliot. The femme

fatale may have a fin-de-siècle languorousness, but it cannot conceal her essentially predatory nature:

She preys wearily

on sensitive wild things

proud to be torn

by the grave couch of her beauty.

This last line makes us retrospectively aware of the physical horror that is lurking behind her

compelling features:

The lips of her desire are grey

and parted like a silk loop

threatening

a slight wanton wound.

What strikes one as particularly impressive here is the lucidity of Beckett’s vision, a quality that is in

short supply in the early poems. But it is a clearness of vision that is enhanced by the momentary

occultation of metaphor, to distance the intimacy, and to render oblique the uncertainty the poet feels.

Although the eye is kept firmly on the object, no attempt is made to penetrate an alien psychology. In

looking out, the poet reveals his own inner condition:

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But she will die and her snare

tendered so patiently

to my tamed watchful sorrow

will break and hang

in a pitiful crescent.

The cold purity of a crescent moon above a beloved’s grave is made to coalesce with the image of a

bird winged by a trap so that it can never fly again, and can only eke out its existence with memories of

how well it was “tendered.” The bitterness coexists with the release of tension ( Pilling, 160-161).

The first “Enueg” traces the peregrinations of the poet after he has left the hospital where his

beloved is dying of tuberculosis. The escape into nature does not help. Here again love is associated

with the idea of death and losing the beloved. Mourning has begun before death and the speaker cannot

find comfort in any thing. By the way, this mourning has begun from the very first moment of the

relationship, as one is to die before the other.

In the poem “Something there”, the poet talks of the existence of something, which is not

necessarily life. Therefore, death exists, and is not equal to non-existence.

so the odd time

out there

somewhere out there

like as if

something

not life

necessarily

Looking through the rest of the poem, this new “something” is nothing but lack of any particular image

and a wasteland. When there is life, the whole globe is “ not yet bare”, the image is horrifying and the

source of the voice which says of “something there” is not clear. But in the last stanza silence and lack

of anything which “shutters” the eyes of the character of the poem with its brightness and thread reigns

and he faces death which is not horrible to him at all. He still exists as death itself has its own existence

as “something” and not “nothing.” The difference is in getting rid of noise and image; then he will be in

peace.

Above it was shown the affinities between the ideas of Beckett and Derrida in the subject of

death. To both of them, death is a daily experience, a state of silence and peace and at the same time

passivity and paralysis. Therefore, there is always an ambivalent attitude towards death, a love and hate

relationship. The dead other is treated as an eternal other and self, so they deconstruct the binary

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opposition of self and other, besides death and life one. None of the two thinkers under discussion

gives a clear definition of life and death, since they know neither of them.

Identity

The danger is the neatness of identification. (Beckett, Dante…Bruno.Vico…Joyce)

Beckett has always been doubtful about the concept of man’s having a clearly definable self. He starts

his literary career with “Whoroscope”, and Descartes, but this does not mean that he agrees with the

idea duality of body and soul, self and other, and man’s having a consistent self which can change the

world with its wisdom. In After Beckett, Nojoumian claims, “I believe Beckett’s point of departure

from Cartesian logic is the way the “self” finally situates himself: “in the middle” of this

duality…Through this, he shatters or deconstructs this duality as well” (390). The speaker in Beckett’s

poems, as well as the speaker of his writings in other genres, cannot separate his inner self from the

outside world. He finds his microcosm and the microcosm of others supplementary. “The self cannot

define itself separately; there are always other names and subjects that relate themselves to

him”(Nojoumian, The Unnamable 396). These others can be the speaker’s dead father, the voice of the

mythological, literal and philosophical figures, or the beloved. But there is another other which is in

him, his other self, whose voice can be heard more in Beckett’s late poems. Besides having the problem

of inseparability from the outside other, he even has the problem of being in an opposition with

himself and choosing one self out of two—if not more—others and voices inside of him is an

undecidable issue.

First, to elaborate more on this subject, the outside other will be focused. The dead other and his

voice which in inside and outside in relation to the speaker, and defines him have been discussed,

speaking of “Malacoda” and the last poem of “Quatre Poems”, here the subject of the beloved as other,

and the problematic being of love in terms of the identity of a person will be explained.

Beckett’s first poem of French collection, “elles viennent”, has a strong love and identity theme

is the first poem of, which is translated below:

they come

others and same

with each it is other and it is same

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with each the absence of love is the same

with each the absence of life is the same.

Here the speaker is talking of women, beloveds, and the experience of the impossible and illusionary

unification with the lover. They are others but at the same time, the speaker himself as every other has

a rout in the subject. The “others and same” can be read in another way which is considering all the

beloved the same although they look different. With each of these women, who are at the same time

different from and same with each other and the speaker, the relationship is at the same time different

and same. So the identity of the speaker and the beloveds are not easily defined, their identities are

supplementary and on the threshold of being different and same. Here the author deconstructs the

binary opposition of same / different.

Aristotle believed that the soul was “intermingled in the whole universe” and this perfectly

justifies his appearance in the mind of a poet who is seeking to experience the truth of that dictum at

the same time as being continually thrust up against the barrier between self and world. In his early

poems, Beckett is always in the outside world, wandering to learn the truth about himself, but it seems

that after a while he understands that this is not a useful way. So he comes back to himself. This can be

due to a new idea saying “truth is in you”, or just a depression of not being able to find the truth in the

macrocosm, although still there are temptation of returning and being with the others and living with

the illusion of being them and at the same time having a unique self. He is facing three aporias: aporia

of being or not being with the others; aporia of being himself or the other; and at last, when alone,

aporia of choosing one out of the many selves in him. So he always goes in and out of his solitude

without gaining any thing concerning his identity but he cannot stop it as his identity has become a

matter of différance to him.

In one of his poems of the first French Collection, “Lutèce Square”, the poet is first walking in a

square with his beloved. But he suddenly leaves her and walks along all by himself in the square with

his eyes on the outside world. Then s/he comes back to him: he either finds his other self coming to

him, which is a shocking issue to him—as man is always thinking of himself as one—or finds her

beloved returning, but as he is in the illusion of being the other when he is in the outside world, “she”

has become “me”.

I shiver, it is I rejoining me,

it is with other eyes that I now see

the sand, the puddles underneath the drizzle,

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a little girl dragging her hoop behind her,

a couple, lovers who knows, hand in hand,

the empty tiers, the lofty houses, and the sky

that lights us up too late.

I return to myself, I am surprised

to find her sad face there.

Deciding whom the speaker is talking about is difficult. It is as difficult as the problem of identity for

him. But the last lines shows that he has chosen one of the selves in him as “myself”, and is no longer

in the illusion of being the girl and seeing the world through her eyes, as she is standing face to face to

him and is out of him, although one cannot say it is a certain constant choice.

“Something there” has the same undecidability in identity motif as well. In the first stanza, there

is a dialogue between two voices, one is the voice of the speaker, the other is the voice of his other,

who can simply be one of his different selves. The surprising thing is that the focalizer who has been

the speaker up to the end of the first stanza changes to third person, who can be his other self. The

change between the selves in the character shatters his consistency. The voice is gone but it does not

say that the speaker is freed from his multiple selves. The idea of having different contracting selves

that lead to one’s not being able to call himself “one”, is elaborated here artistically. Reader can

understand that what Beckett says completely differs from what others call a simple change in the

mood of one. The problem is being no one, having no central self. Of course, there is a possibility of

having another voice, character, and focalizer/speaker too; one can separates the focalizer from the

speaker and voice, and consider it a third person and an outside other, but this does not still clarify the

source of the other voice and the identity of the character.

Something there

Where

Out there

Out where

Outside

What

The head what else

Something there somewhere outside

At the faint sound so brief

It is gone and the whole globe

Not yet bare

The eye

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Opens wide

Wide

Till in the end

Nothing more

Shutters it again

Derrida has the same habit of having another voice in his works contradicting him, this is in its

prime in Spurs where the other voice even mocks the logic of the person who is supposed to be the

main speaker, he puts him in the margin from time to time, so the center is always changing. The reader

cannot say who had the dominant voice or idea in the work. Beckett and Derrida both deconstruct the

centrality in identity.

One of the last poems by Beckett is “Neither” which talks of the undecidability of identity.

Neither the inner nor the outer life; neither him, nor the other, and none of his selves can be chosen.

The speaker is just going “to and fro in shadow” and wanders between the multiplying options

concerning his being, that very essential and seemingly easy question. The title itself shows the idea of

this uncertainty, that he is none of the selves he finds in or out of him. And his self is at the same time

all of them. So he is following the Derridean logic of “both A and not-A” or “neither A nor not-A”

versus that of “either A…or not-A”. There is no clear A and not-A, they are supplementary, and even

there is no “neither A nor not-A”, as a part of each of these two contrasting items is in a way accurate

for the speaker, so there is always a play of negating and admitting when one is to choose. Here

“neither” means “both” too, which is a deconstruction of these two terms.

to and fro in shadow from inner to outer shadow

from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself

by way of neither

This idea can be supported when we find that the speaker uses the same adjective for both self and

unself, he cannot ignore none of them and pass, they are supplementary, he is stuck. Although neither

of them can satisfy him, but he cannot stop being present as one, so he needs both impossible options.

In the ending lines of the poem it seems that he wants to absent himself from self and other, this

will lead to silence and death, which is the land of womb and before it too. This is the second phase of

Beckettian ideology, according to Alain Robbe-Grillet, which is elaborated in Endgame. Of course, this

is an impossible act to get rid of the presence, as man is present even when dead. He only wants to stop

living with the others and go back to his solitude. His solitude has always been full of his other selves,

so what he wants to do is to reduce the “cultural noises” and the struggles of finding the identity

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between many selves, and get closer to the land of death and silence. Silence does not seem horrible to

him, as it sometimes was/is, and would/will make him speak not to die. The two tenses are used, as this

research does not aim to suggest that the speaker/poet is now out of the ambivalence of loving/detesting

death and silence. He is just closer to the silence willing side now, which cannot be so persistent.

absent for good

from self and other

then no sound

then gently light unfading on that unheeded

neither

unspeakable home

At the time being he is enjoying the silent womb like home within himself, where he cannot talk

of, as it is indescribable and describing it will destroy it, as it will break silence, which is one of the

essential stones of its structure. But the light is always on the problem of “neither”: the problem of

choosing the identity. This will, sooner or later, shatter the silence. The problem of identity is

irresolvable.

Here the impossibility of identity in the eyes of Beckett and Derrida was discussed. Man always

defines himself in relation with the other; no matter s/he is out of him in the macrocosm, or in him, as

his other self, in the microcosm. The identity of man is always on the threshold of self and other. He

can never give in to being the other completely as it is impossible and against his selfhood. But at the

same time he cannot have an independent self as his self is built upon the other. Subject is constituted

by its exposure to others; there is no self-standing, according to Derrida. So as self is a “constitute” of

the other he cannot tell himself from him, besides being a separate individual by definition. Thus he

can never find out who he is and his identity.

Love

Love is another key concept and motif in Beckett’s poetry. I have already discussed love/death and the

idea of beloved as the other who is identical with and different from the speaker at the same time. Here,

proofs from the poems about the illusive nature of true love, with which Derrida agrees, will be brought

that would admit the affinity of the idea of these two thinkers about the concept of love.

The true love is a sublime issue, and according to Derrida and Beckett there is nothing sublime

and complete in itself. Derrida deconstructs the Kantian idea of sublime entities, using German

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philosopher’s own terms, parargon (a kind of decoration for the work of art) and ergon or the work of

art, which is known as sublime and complete, and finds them supplementary; if ergon was perfect, then

there would be no parargon. The existence of Parargon brings the completeness and sublimity of

ergon under question. He finds the binary opposition of ergon/ parargon vicious and problematic

(Shaw, 119). Beckett by bringing examples in his art supports this idea. True love as a sublime entity is

in need of physical love, as it helps the lover to get closer to unification, which is an inseparable part of

true love. So true love is not complete and cannot be sublime. On the other hand, physical love should

have a spiritual part to be love; otherwise, it is only the manifestation of a blind passion. Here besides

deconstructing the binary opposition of True Love/Physical Love by declaring the two seemingly

contrasting terms in need of each other, Beckett speaks of the destructiveness of each part for the other

while requiring it. Each of the opposite sides can only exist and be defined when the other side exists,

but harms it with its own existence. This play of preserving/ destroying last forever and none of the two

contracting forces can demolish the other, they are always standing armed at the front and threshold.

This leads to ambivalence in the speaker of the works of Beckett, he cannot take one side of the

opposition.

One of the best love poems by Beckett is the poem “Cascando.” In this poem the speaker is

terrified of loving someone else, of breaking a promise. He wants his love to last but he knows that it is

impossible and is scared of it then. He seems to get to the understanding of the temporality and

uncatchable being of love in the second stanza. He first says, “if I do not love you I shall not love” but

after lines he contradicts himself saying: “terrified again …of loving and not you.” So it seems possible

for him to love someone else while it is impossible as said before. Beckett has not changed his mind.

He has not found second love possible for him but it seems that it is inevitable although undesirable.

This reminds us of the very famous quotation of Beckett: “I can’t go on, I will go on.” One can think

that the first notion is true: a true lover can never fall in love with someone else even after separation,

as he is living with the memory of the beloved. Then there is no reason for being scared as second love

will not come, and whenever it comes, then the person has forgotten the first love completely and does

not think of it. A second love when someone is thinking of the first is not love then. But Beckett does

not believe in these clear-cut rules. He knows that it is a romantic, idealistic, and wrongly certain idea

about love: no matter how much he resists and lives in the fairy land of one eternal love, a second love

and a betray to the first love will happen. This second love is not less than the first one, but the

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memories of the first love co-exist with it. The reason why this can happen is that love is all a

pretension, and the speaker is terrified of pretending to be in love all this long.

In the other section, the poet hesitates again in the pretentious nature of love. He thinks of some

people who can really love his beloved, and this is a relief to him as he finds a truth in life, although he

is not the one who loves, as if he is incapable of it. However, he does not find a synthesis for the true

love/ pretentious love, and is in the state of undecidability, as in the word “unless” there is a hesitation

and uncertainty.

Another interesting thing about this poem is that the word love is used for the both kinds of love

without adjective, as if we are using one signifier for two signifieds. Love is a word referring to a broad

range of concepts and there is no closure for the trace of all the things love is and is not, which define it

by their absence.

In the fourth poem of the Quatre Poemes the poet wants his beloved dead. As said before, there

are two endings, which lead to different poems: the English one describes the beloved as “first and last

to love me” and the French one as “one who thought she loves me.” To learn more about the concept

of love in the eyes of Beckett, focusing on the two endings is needed.

To do so one should consider two sides of the binary opposition of true love (English Version)

/pretentious love (French Version) synonyms, and deconstruct the opposition. Then the true love is as

false as a pretentious one. The truth does not exist, or at least is not to be captured; it is always to come

and undergoes the matter of Derridean différance. Now that love is not true, the poet wants to take

revenge from the one who just pretends to love him. But if he is truly in love with her, he cannot live

without her and wants her always alive and happy, even if she does not love him. Therefore, the true

being of his love for her and by sequence the true being of love in general, is under question here again.

The death wish can be a revenge taken from the beloved, and even himself, for falling in such an

artificial love.

On the other hand, if we try to consider the “true love” an antonym for the “pretentious love”,

and try to pretend betraying the findings about the nature of love in the previous paragraph, and believe

in the possibility of existence of true love for granted, we get to some other reading of love and death.

How can one have his true love dead, when he is alive? He needs her dead to feel living and defined in

relation to an already dead and eternal other. Even with the precondition of having true love in the

world, and reading the French and English versions of this poem as two separate poems with opposing

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ideas of the lover, we get to the similar ideas about true love’s being a non-existing concept. May be

Beckett puts the two different endings for this poem to show us no matter how much man tries to

separate true love from the pretentious love, he will not succeed as they overlap;

In the first poem of the first French collection, “elles viennent”, the poet writes, “with each the

absence of love is the same.” It is interesting that the speaker does not say; “with each love is the

same”. He is talking about the trace and absence of love, which defines love. Therefore, love is not

present in any love relationship, and is always something to come and undergoes the matter of

diffèrance.

Another idea about love in Backettian and Derridean viewpoint is its encounter with ethics, and

the problem of physical love/spiritual love. As Patricia Coughlan in “The Poetry is Another Pair of

Sleeves” claims:

one might point out that the lyric speakers in the poems are anxious to an exactly equal extent

about the failure of attachment—the loss of love—and the failure of detachment: erotic desire

and longing are matched by moments of recoil and fear of destructive immersion in the

other.(73)

In the third poem of the first French collection, the poet writes “to be there jawless toothless/where the

pleasure of loss is lost/together with the scarcely inferior /one of gain.” There is an enjoyable fear of

loosing love by making it physical in the speaker. “Loss” of the physical presence of the beloved, is

better that loss of love, which comes after the “inferior” pleasure of physical attachment. Lovemaking

is killing love by means of love and with the illusive aim to capture love. It is the end of the illusion of

sameness with the lover, with its getting close to unification but not reaching to it, as there is always a

distance between the lovers—their skin at least. Sex brings the fancy concept of love down to earth.

One good example of this subject in his poetry is in “Alba”, where according to Coughlan “ The

characteristic Beckettian aporia occurs:the desired woman’s beauty produces a blank sheet and ‘bulk

dead’, instead of the conventional ‘sun’ and ‘unveiling’; the ‘tempest of emblems’ is quite obscured”

(75).

who though you stoop with fingers of compassion

to endorse the dust

shall not add to your bounty

whose beauty shall be a sheet before me

a statement of itself drawn across the tempest of emblems

so that there is no sun and no unveiling

and no host

only I and then the sheet

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and bulk dead

The physical beauty of the beloved is like a veil before the eyes of the speaker, it disturbs his view of

true love. But at the same time it is beauty of the woman which makes the man love her, so true love

is based on physical appearance and is inseparable from it. Therefore, no fixed idea about morality or

immorality, and physicality or meta-physicality of love exists. Even the speaker cannot claim any thesis

about the sublime being of beauty. “It is this discovery [of the absence of reliable system, whether

metaphysical, moral, or aesthetic] which is rehersed in Alba” (Coughlan, 75). This is exactly the

undecidability and aporia of man in the world according to Derrida; there is no certain answer for any

question in life.

The second poem of the first French collection is another example of physical love

encountering true love without being prior or even inferior to it. The “calm act” of sex (“à elle l'acte

calme”), untroubled by considerations of its spiritual value, seems the necessary precondition to

genuine love: “l’absence / au service de la presence.” The “quelques haillons d'azur dans la tête” (“few

fragments of blue in the head”) signal the first appearance of a metaphor for his idea about heavenly

and true love. The absence of spirituality in lovemaking is in the service of the spiritual love, it is a

trace of it. The “late grace of rain” is the spiritual gift of love, which has fallen on the speaker once,

although it has been too late for him, but now it is ceasing to fall, now that he is making love and is

united with the lover. The act of ejaculation and satisfaction of the speaker is compared to the woman’s

emptying him of love. The end of lovemaking is losing love, which is contradictory as love should

have been made and strengthen. The undecidability of the speaker is clear with his being passive but

the woman is active in lovemaking and can “empty him pure of love.”

with her the calm act

the clever pores the affable sex

the waiting not so slow the regrets not so long absence

in the service of the presence

few fragments of blue in the head the spots

finally dead of heart

all the late grace of a rain ceasing

to fall on an August night

with her empty him pure of love

In Beckett and Eros, the Davies claims “the female sex is given two contrasting forms, love

active and love passive; and the male sex is likewise given two forms of hatred, one of fleeing and

41

disinvolvement…,and one of pursuit and oppression”( 93). Here the woman has the “love active form”,

and the hatred of man is “one of pursuit and oppression.” He does not run away, as he is in love and

cannot decide whether sex will improve or destroy their love, this undecidability leads him to a

paralysis, which can be a defensive system in him, as through this passivity, he denies all the

responsibilities and promises. But this is an unconscious act, one cannot say that the speaker is

irresponsible, he just cannot decide, and this is decision which brings responsibility, so it is natural that

he can be free of any responsibility now that he cannot choose.

In the fourth poem of Quatre Poemes the anti-erotic stance is characteristic, but little is added to

the kind of complex responses to love already examined except, perhaps, a quietist pathos that is not

Beckett's forte. Here the writer wants his beloved die to loose her physical forces. Then they cannot

make love and their love will be eternal. Here the beloved takes a “love passive form and the speaker’s

hatred is “one of fleeing and disinvolvement.” By having her beloved dead he can escape all the

circumstances of a physical love.

Paul Davies writes “the role of the female changes, according to this pattern from the

ambivalent erotic attraction of the woman-figure, to become the mother figure who must either be fled

from…or destroyed”( 93). This uncertainty of female sex about her identity is due to the speaker’s

disability in taking one notion about love and self, prior to the others. He wants to have a heavenly

relation with the beloved, free from eroticism, and this leads to changes in the beloved’s identity; she

becomes mother or sister to get rid of sexuality, but even this is not satisfactory for the speaker. The

love of mother or sister is not what he wants. To experience the heavenly love of the beloved, the

speaker should give the identity of a beloved to her but empty her from eroticism, which is impossible,

so the only way is her death and losing physicality. The mother- beloved should die so that the speaker

can be in love with her, just to be in love with her. He prefers to love the dead and non-beings. Here

death has a double function: it puts the mother under erasure forever, and preserves the beloved

eternally as well.

Another example of this change in the identity of the beloved in the eyes of the speaker is in

“From the Only Poet to a Shining Whore”.

Oh radiant, oh angry, oh Beatrice,

she foul with the victory

of the bloodless fingers

and proud, and you, Beatrice, mother, sister,

daughter, beloved,

fierce pale flame

of doubt, and God’s sorrow,

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and my sorrow.

The disgust at erotic satisfaction (“she foul with the victory / of the bloodless fingers”) parallels the

satisfactions of the spirit. These are shown to be equivocal not only for Beatrice and Dante (and

Beckett as Dante), but also for God, whose “sorrow” doubtlessly derives from his inability to possess

the beauty of Beatrice more carnally than even his penetration can guarantee.

God is the pure soul, the silent. But even he is in search of presence and bodily pleasures.

Therefore, the aporia the speaker encounters in choosing body and soul, and living on the threshold of

them, is understandable. This is not only applicable to his attitude towards love, but also to his view of

death, silence, absence and presence.

In this part, the concept of divine love/physical love was discussed. In the previous sections of

identity and death, the relation of speaker and the beloved (dead or alive) as the other to him, and the

problem of identifying the self and completion through love was elaborated. Here the deconstruction of

the binary opposition of body and soul, spirituality and physicality by love in the poems of Beckett and

the works of Derrida was shown. The divine love is in need of bodily love as it is the embodiment of

the spiritual unification of the two lovers. But at the same time this is the physicality of love which

destroys it. These two seemingly opposite sides of love are supplementary and destructive for each

other. This makes Beckett’s love poems self-deconstructive.

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Chapter Three: Self-deconstructiveness of Language

Beckett’s first and last writing is poetry. He started his career with “Whoroscope” and ended it with

“What is the word.” He always knew himself, and desired to be known, as a poet (according to Harvey)

although he was famous for his plays, short fictions, and novels. What is so significant in this genre and

this specific form of language usage? What is poetry?

This question is the title of one of the essays of Jacques Derrida, “che cos’è la poesia?” in

which he has answered the question:

1. The economy of memory: a poem must be brief, elliptical by vocation, whatever may be its

objective or apparent expanse…

2. The heart: …a story of “heart” poetically enveloped in the idiom “apprendre par coeur,”

whether in my language or another, the English language (to learn by heart)…. (229)

Knowing Beckett’s interest in reduced language and getting rid of mind and knowledge, one

can simply find the idea of Derrida of poetry so close to that of Beckett. Derrida finds poetry beyond

language and always trying to defend itself against it, like a rolled up hedgehog, but paradoxically it is

more vulnerable to language. So the process of writing poetry seems impossible:

It[poem] is first of all thrown out on the roads and in the fields, thing beyond languages, even if

it sometimes happens that it recalls itself in language, when it gathers itself up, rolled up in a

ball on itself[as a hedgehog], it is more threatened than even in its retreat: it thinks it is

defending itself, and it loses itself. (Che Cos’e 231)

Beckett has always been aware and even fond of the impossible actions, and always wanted to

write beyond language. Of course he, and Derrida, knew that impossible is not impossible, as if it really

was it would not have a name. “If we are going to speak of it [impossible], we will have to name

something. Not to present the thing, here the impossible, but to try with its name, or with some name,

to give an understanding of or to think this impossible thing, this impossible itself” (Given Time 10). So

Beckett writes poetry to overcome language as he finds it close to possible, if not completely feasible.

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The other thing about poem, as said is its being understandable only by heart and not by mind.

So the reader should approach more and more to the realm of ignorance, the territory of death and

peace which everyone, consciously or unconsciously, are trying to get to. Of course, this ignorance is

not a genuine one, and as Beckett claims it is a “learned ignorance”; man after learning the hollowness

of Knowledge and meaninglessness of life, decides to give up learning anything but ignorance and

living his life by heart, as he was supposed to before eating from the Tree of Knowledge.

I call a poem that very thing that teaches the heart, invents the heart, that which, finally, the

word heart seems to mean and which, in my language, I cannot easily discern from the word

itself…In order to respond in two words [the question of what poetry is]: ellipsis, for example,

or election, heart, hèrisson, or istrice[hedgehog], you will have had to disable memory, disarm

culture, know how to forget knowledge, set fire to the library of poetics. The unicity of the poem

depends on this condition…it[poetry] lets itself be done, without activity, without work, in the

most sober pathos, a stranger to all production, especially to creation.

(Derrida, Che Cos’e 231-233)

This giving in to ignorance and death, and the reduced elliptic language which is so close to

silence, is what Beckett has always longed to get to in his works and to him they are quite synonyms:

silence is the death of man which is at the same time desired, when one sees it as peaceful kind of life,

and horrible, when he finds death as nothingness. To be able to express all these in the best way

possible he chooses poetry which is an excellent medium for it. I am going to bring some examples of

his poems in this chapter, and support the ideas given which both Beckett and Derrida believed in.

In another section of this chapter the closeness of the ideas of these two thinkers about

translation will be discussed and some proofs from Beckett’s translation of poetry will be brought.

Poetics of Failure

Beckett’s art is about the undecidability of man in the massive world, as there is not a single issue

which man is certain of. To express this, the form and language of his works is confusing. He himself

in an interview claims “to find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.”

On the other hand he believes that behind all the dilemmas and aporias of life, there is nothing

particular in the world. All we have is a game to be able to ignore the burden of nothingness. Seeing

this, all the serious issues in life and literature are ridiculous to him. Even language is nothing to him as

it is a completely arbitrary system to express the nothingness of life. But this does not mean that one

can and should stop any activities; he needs to express himself to live, no matter how impossible

expressing this nothingness of life is. If he quit it he will be dead and may be a non-being. He may lose

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even this nothing. Although getting rid of life sometimes is a desire for the writer, but besides it there is

always a fear of entering to a state one does not know anything of. In “Three Dialogues” Beckett finds

art as “ The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, no power to

express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express” (17). The role of the artist is here

of significance, as he is the one to express and the one who knows it is impossible. He fails constantly

in expressing the nothingness as his material—words and language in the case of Beckett—is unable to

reflect any meaning, if be. But he should keep on being. “To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail,

that failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living”

(Beckett, Duthuit, Three Dialogues 21). This idea is expressed in his poems too. In “Casket of Pralinen

for a Daughter of a Dissipated Mandarin” he writes:

Oh I am ashamed

of all clumsy artistry

I am ashamed of presuming

to arrange words

of everything but the ingenious fibers

that suffer honestly.

The failure in the expressing due to the shortages of language and the thing to be expressed is clearly

shown in the poetry of Beckett. Here the four prominent aspects of his language usage and its affinity

with the idea he is expressing in his poems will be discussed: repetition, shattered syntax, silence and

music.

Reductive Variations to Say the Same Thing

The absoluteness of “original” experience lies in its repetition, this repetition is the “self-

deconstruction” which Attridge named as the signature of the work of Beckett. (Lane 67)

Repetition is a main element in the poetry of Beckett. In his early poems he repeats (quotes) the other

thinkers and writers, but in his late poems he repeats (quotes) himself more and more. According to

him there is nothing new and unsaid in the world, although each work of art is unique. He talks of this

contradictory essence of art as “the new thing which has happened” (Disjecta 70). Derrida has the same

style of writing in his works. About 2/3 of Cinders is the repetition of some parts of “Envoi” He claims

The citations co-appear along with it [the text], they are “summoned”: an incomplete archive,

still burning or already consumed, recalling certain textual sites, the continuous, tormenting,

obsessive meditation about what are and are not, what is meant—or silenced by, cinders. (26)

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Beckett burns down his language and speech to its cinder, and then repeats it. His language is that of

trace, it reminds of a repeated idea, without completely quoting it. This reducing language to its most

reduced form is the best way to get rid of it, represent the life’s repetitiveness and its essence as nothing

especial, as life is what the language expresses. There is a good affinity between the form and the

content of Beckett’s art.

But no repetition is completely the same thing said before, as both Beckett and Derrida believe.

Nothing happens twice exactly, time and context change, therefore the reading of an event is different

each time it happens. By repeating with slight variation, Beckett wants to assert this idea as well.

To bring some example from the poems, the very first one will be focused first: “Whoroscope”.

This poem is impossible to read without the help of the Eliotian notes, and may be Harvey’s 60 pages

of explanation. It is full of quotations and historical events. This puts it between literature and

biography or history. But what is the use of it? By getting rid of poetic language the poet gets closer to

the reality of life and breaks the sublimity of the great French philosopher, Descartes, about whom the

poem is. By repeating the historical texts in this way he makes it so common and recurrent, he

desecrates history by repeating it so.

The poet uses same words but in contrasting meanings. This is related to the idea of

impossibility of a mere repetition and according to Derrida “Affirmation of negativity”, when he

discusses the subject of repetition in “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials.”

We’re moving he said we’re off-Porca

Madonna!

the way a boatswain would be, or a sack-of-

potatoey charging Pretender.

That’s not moving, that’s moving.

Here Beckett is explaining the idea of relative movement, discovered by Galileo: one standing in a boat

is not moving seemingly but as the boat moves, he is moving. This idea of being static and dynamic at

the same is well shown Beckett’s line. Another example of the revealing repetition is in the first poem

of the first French collection, “elles viennent”. This work is a good instance of Derridean iterability:

others and same

with each it is other and it is same

with each the absence of love is the same

with each the absence of life is the same.

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The experience of being in love seems to be the same no matter who the beloved is, but at the same

time it is different from lover to lover as they are not the same. Love should be repeatable but at the

same time it is unrepeatable, as the context of each love is different. This iterability in the experience

is transformed to the experience of language too: the incomplete repetition of the last two sentences

shows the necessity and impossibility of repetition allegorically.

Another side of the repetition in language is the music it makes. The importance of music in the

eyes of Beckett in its own section below will be discussed, but here it can be claimed that as Beckett

knew music as the best form of utterance and built upon silences, he wanted to bring in into his art

which was always under erasure and in search of silence. May be one of the other reasons he preferred

poetry over other genres is its being musical, even in its most minimalist form. He does not simply use

rhythm and rhyme to have music, as it is the most artificial language usage, and Beckett always wanted

to get rid of the arbitrary chains of it. Music is a communication system, which has nothing to do with

knowledge and translation. It is universal and understandable for all. The technique Beckett uses to

bring music into his poems is reducing language to “fundamental sounds” and repeats them like

musical notes. Of course they have a significance other than their sound, which is the meaning they

represent. But this is so close to the music produced by them. Elizabeth Drew, in her essay, “HEAD TO

FOOTSTEPS: ‘Fundamental sounds’ in ‘dread nay’ and ‘Roundelay’” explains that the repetitiveness

of the words resemble the footsteps of the speaker, wandering in the world. This is understandable for

anyone who knows or does not know English, who can or cannot read a poem. Even in other poems in

which the speaker is in his own microcosm, the repetitive sounds remind us of the repetitiveness of life

and time.

Repetition is more prominent in the late poems. I have discussed the repetition in “Thither” and

its role in transmitting the implications of the poet in the previous chapter. The last poem by Beckett,

“What is the word” is based on repetition. This expresses the repetitive nature of language and words:

we have a few words language is made of, by repeating them in different syntax and context to

communicate. There is nothing new in word. The poem is made of 22 words repeated several times to

get to 228 words.

what is the word -

seeing all this -

all this this -

all this this here -

folly for to see what -

glimpse -

seem to glimpse -

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need to seem to glimpse -

afaint afar away over there what -

folly for to need to seem to glimpse afaint afar away over there what -

what -

what is the word –

Therefore, repetition is a significant element in the poetry of Beckett. It represents the repetition

in time and life. Repetition is never completely possible as the context changes each time, so each

word/experience is always happening as if it is its first time of occurrence. This is against the definition

of repetition. Beckett has used repetition against itself: one cannot simply ignore the new significances

of a repeated word in his works, and on the other hand one cannot deny the reduction of the effect in

repetition. He produces ambivalence and aporia for the reader by the use of repetition.

Shattered Syntax

Beckett does not use the classic syntax and logic of language. The usage of punctuation is so rare and

leads to undecidability in reading, as a sentence without any comma or period has no closure. Derrida

is interested in this subject too and many of his works have started by his different readings a sentence

suggests.

The sentence says what it will have been, from the moment it gives itself up to itself, giving

itself as its own proper name, the consumed (and consummate) art of the secret: of knowing how

to keep itself from showing. (Cinders 35)

This is what Beckett thinks of life in general; there can be many reading of any routine act in life, any

defined term. There is a secret behind everything which it is always fighting not to reveal.

By changing the syntax to nothing ordered, he shifts the limits of language, of course without

passing them as it is impossible. According to Lane in Beckett and Philosophy he approaches the “edge

of language.” But no matter how reduced his language in terms of syntax and diction is, it is still

language.

His new syntax is rhetoric, but a rhetoric confronting rhetoric, it is always in denial of its being,

and it is constantly under erasure. Even the most minimalistic poetic language cannot get rid of rhetoric

as it always refers to something beyond what it says. However, Beckett’s rhetoric is against all rhetoric

ever was. It is conscious of its own being rhetorical so it is against itself. Beckett has used classical

rhetoric like metaphor, synecdoche, and allusion in his early poetry although in his own way, which

was so far away from the way others used it. His use of rhetoric does not lead to beautiful, completely

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understandable poems, but rather to complication and mess. It is as if his usage of rhetoric is a kind of

ridiculing rhetoric and defeating it. In his late poetry he quit complicated language and tried to write in

simple language and use as few figures of speech as possible. Beckett knows that the parargon of

rhetoric is inseparable from the ergon of the language of a literary work, they are supplementary. But

he tries to reduce it to the least possible, to the cinders.

Shattered syntax is more prominent in the late poems, but in the earlier poems there exists this

kind of syntax too. It is as if the poet by breaking the pose of the classic grammar and syntax tries to

experience all the possibilities of language and reading. Beckett uses this and when there are

boundaries he simply breaks them, so he takes language to the state of a relative freedom. He gets best

language can give to refer to more meaning and taking advantage of this against language itself.

In the poem “Cascando” we have “last times of loving/of knowing not knowing pretending.”

There can be more than one reading and therefore one interpretation of these sentences, and they can

even contradict, so the reader is to be able to digest all the impossibilities of having contradictory ideas

at the same time, and in one sentence. The first reading can be “last times of loving/of knowing not

knowing/ pretending.” In this reading the man is accused of having the knowledge of his knowing

nothing, and this is the whole knowledge of him, the rest is pretence. This motif of lack of knowledge

is repeated by Beckett in the first poem of the Second French collection when he writes “and we know

none we know nothing at all”, so for a reader this is a familiar idea. The other reading is “last times of

loving/of knowing not knowing pretending.” Here the speaker claims that man knows that he does not

know that he pretends and knows nothing. Therefore, the speaker is conscious of his unconscious act of

pretending. This is a big paradox and completely impossible, but the poet never deprives the reader on

the threshold of the impossible as it makes the impossible close to possible. Pretence is always

intentional be definition, but here it is treated as a conscious act, which is in itself deconstruction of the

concepts of pretence and knowledge, conscious and unconscious, intentional and unintentional.

Another reading is “of knowing/ not knowing/ pretending”. In this case the speaker is negating himself;

first he wants to talk of the knowledge he has (here about love), but then he understands that he does

not know any thing and is only pretending. This sentence is repeated in the poem but with a slight

difference: “of knowing not knowing pretending/pretending”. The second pretending is added which

can be read as a new line, increasing the weight of the concept of pretence in relation to knowledge,

and its previous line can have its two mentioned readings. But if we consider it as an instance of run-

on-line, then there can be new readings: “[O]f knowing not knowing pretending pretending”, meaning

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the speaker knows that he does not know that he pretends that he is pretending. The act of pretension is

doubled, it is like an actor playing the role one who is pretending to know something, but the actor

knows that he does not know he is doing so, this means he is drawn in his role in a way that he cannot

tell pretension from knowledge, and that is the only thing he knows. This is what “human condition” is.

There can be more readings but the few discussed here shows Beckett’s use of shattered syntax to

imply more meanings which means to lack of closure. On the other hand by using this new syntax

which is defeating itself as “syntax”, Beckett brings opposing ideas into a challenge, he deconstructs

many definitions by putting them beside their opposite in an shattered syntax, where no dash or comma

acts as the frontier between them, there is no threshold. Therefore their being supplementary and

undecidability of defining them clearly can be perfectly shown. The poet implies the arbitrariness of

language and life’s becoming a linguistic game.

In “What is the word”, this shattered syntax gets to its pick. Words are constantly repeating and

the only cohesion and drive of the poem is the number of words which increases: the reader is waiting

for a “word to come”, which can give a meaning to the poem and be an answer to the question the title

poses. But the only thing he gains at last is uncertainty caused by the multiple meaning words imply in

the free arrangement and syntax the poet uses. For instance “folly for to need to seem to glimpse afaint

afar away over there what –”can be read as “folly for/to need to seem to glimpse afaint /afar /away

/over there /what –”or “folly for/ to need/ to seem/ to glimpse/ afaint/ afar/ away/ over there /what –”.

There can be no closure for this poem, and consequently the definition of language and the art of

Beckett. He is uncertain about the subject so how can he provide the reader with a clear answer for his

questions. He can just put him in the labyrinth of his own messed up thought by using a language

accurate for it. Derrida talks about this issue in The Ear of the Other

Perhaps all of the poetic works he [the author] does in order to mark his patronym in his text,

either in pieces or in an integral fashion, is a means not only of misleading the reader or the

detectives—the critical detectives—but also of losing himself. Perhaps he doesn”t know his

proper name. (106)

In “Dread Nay” there is no classical syntax use and logical and linguistic relationship between

the lines. This leads to reader’s relating them with any logic s/he finds appropriate, this is the reader

who is making the text, although Beckett has written a text upon which the reader is producing new

ones. According to Derrida in Post Card

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…the “author” already is no longer there, no longer responsible. He has absented himself in

advance, leaving the document in your hands. At least this is what he states. He does not seek to

convince you of a truth. He does not seek to detract any thing from the power, the proprietary

investments, that is, the associations and projections of anyone. Association is free, which holds

also for the contract between the writing and the reading of this text, along with the exchange,

engagements, and gifts, along with everything whose performance is attempted. At least this is

what he says. The speculation discourse would have the value of what is performed in analysis,

or in the field called “literary”: you make of it what you like or what you can, it no longer

concerns me, it has no law, especially scientific law. It concerns you….you can no longer get

rid of the uncontestable inheritance…until the end of time you will formulate the theory carrying

his name. (344)

This idea of deconstructive Derrida is traceable in the poems of Beckett especially in the poem under

discussion. The following extract shows lack of a clear association between the lines, which leads to

reader’s associating them in uncountable ways.

Head sphere

Ashen smooth

One eye

No hint when to

Then glare

Cyclop no

One side

Eerily

Of course the reader may figure out the poet is speaking of an apocalyptic gray land with someone

reduced to an eye looking outside. But the reader can read/reproduce the text in many other ways: it

may describe the inner state of man, to a threshold land between outside and inside world. And else, he

can read the sentences using any grammatical and logical order he wishes, as the poet puts it to him.

The special kind of syntax Beckett uses, which close to nothing, leads to his getting rid of any

promise of suggesting any certain meaning. This obligation goes to the reader who searches for

meaning. The infinite number of significances the text with shattered syntax can produce makes closure

impossible. This freedom and openness of text is what Beckett and Derrida are interested and believe

in. On the other hand this shattered syntax reduces the arbitrary language to its elements and its main

aim: communicate meaning. But it has a negative effect as well, which is intentional: the poet shows

that the communication the language makes is a mere misunderstanding. Shattered syntax is a specific

use of language standing against language. It is a rhetoric although looks free from any rhetoric and in

struggle with it. The text with this kind of syntax is rhetorical but defeats rhetorical texts. This is what

Paul de Man knows as the definition of a self-deconstructive text.

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Silence

In “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials”, Derrida speaks of the necessity and impossibility of silence.

First he says

To avoid speaking, to delay the moment when one will have to say something and perhaps

acknowledge, surrender, impart a secret, one amplifies the digressions. I will here attempt

a brief digression on the secret itself. Under this title, “how to avoid speaking”, either

because one has promised not to speak and to keep a secret, or because one has an interest,

sometimes vital, in keeping silence even if put to the rack. This situation again

presupposes the possibility of speaking. (86)

Then he finds silence out of reach of man and a form of language and speech. Therefore he

deconstructs the concept of silence as believed: a state beyond language.

Even if I decide to be silent, even if I decide to promise nothing, not to commit myself to

saying something that would confirm once again the destination of speech, and the

destination toward speech, this silence yet remains a modality of speech: a memory of

promise and a promise of memory. (Derrida, How to Avoid 84)

Beckett has the same attitude toward silence too. He knows it as a relief from the wounded

language has caused in the soul of man. But at the same time he is aware of the impossibility of getting

rid of language. As Nojoumian claims about Unnamable, “The narrator speaks in and endless manner

waiting to be put into silence by words” (The unnamable 393). The speakers of the works of Beckett

are always in search of silence but are speaking constantly, it is as if they want to demolish language

through language. Paul Stewart, believes “…unnamabality cannot be approached through language,

and yet that is all we have” (244). As Heidegger says we are like fish in the sea of language, we cannot

imagine any where else and cannot live any where else—if be. “Silence or death is inscribed within

language and at the same time it is the outcast of language, it is the negative and positive of

language”(Nojoumian, The Unnamable 401).

On the other hand, they are scared of silence as it is associated with death in their minds. So

they have a love and hate relationship with silence as they have with death; they are both desired as

they are peaceful, and undesired as are unknown and may be a non-being state. “self’s obligation to

speak in order to “be” as if to have a short pause in between—even for thinking in advance about what

to say—might end in non-being” (Nojoumian, The Unnamable 394). Beckett finds “Silence as the

death of language and the death of the self” (Nojoumian, The Unnamable 397). But as I said this does

not mean that the speaker of the works detests silence.

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Silence and death eventually become “a blessed place to be”. It is not surprising, then, to see

that critics take silence as the God of Beckett’s negative theology…silence is not the place of

non-knowledge but the place of one does not have knowledge of.

(Nojoumian, The Unnamable 399)

Language and self are always under erasure in Beckett’s art. I have already brought examples

of Beckett’s notion of silence/death and silence/ self from his poems in the previous chapter under

Death and Identity sections. Here a few more examples from his poems concerning this subject, with an

eye on silence specifically, will be brought.

In the sixth poem of the first French collection the poet is speaking of a silence within and

without.

Music of indifference

heart time air fire sand

of silence atrophy of loves

cover their voice so

that I may hear no more

me silent

The “music of indifference” is killing to him—although from time to time this indifference becomes

precious to the poet. To defend himself from indifference he needs silence or language. He has

suggested the two ways by using the complicated phrase “sand of silence.” Sand is the trace of the sea;

the poet has named the essential elements of nature as they are what remains from love, they are the

bones of Echo; air for wind, fire, and sand for water, which is not there, and at the same time for soil as

it is a kind of soil any how. Silence is the trace of the absent sea of language. So first he wants to face

music with silence and then with its trace, language.

1. He asks for silence to stand against the music of indifference, he wants silence to reign, and not only his

own silence (both in the internal and external worlds) but the silence of the world without. When there is

voice, the opposite of it, silence, can be heard, but when there is only silence, then nothing is heard. This

silence swallows music, but the tone of the poem indicates that this silence is not attainable.

2. If the sand of silence cannot stop music, may be the sea of language can. The speaker wants the people

surrounding him keep silence as he needs himself not to be silent, he wants to hear his self’s voice. In

the presence of the others he is not himself and their voices disturb his internal dialogue, which is one of

his “vital symptoms.” He wants to break his silence to be. The other reading of “I may hear no more /me

silent” is hearing yourself speaking. But as the first line has a very strong and single meaning in

comparison to the rest of the poem, I think the empire of the music can never fall even in the presence of

language.

The ambivalent attitude of the speaker toward the concepts of silence, language and music is so

clearly elaborated in this poem. Silence and language are at the same time desired and undesired. That

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is the case with music: up to now I gave the indifference of music a negative value according to Pilling.

But Harvey, when discussing this poem finds indifference of a great value to the speaker. So music of

indifference due to its ignoring all the essentials of life and the existence of speaker can be an enemy,

and at the same time because of its valuing nothing more that the other and breaking all the hierarchies

is so desirable to the speaker. The speaker is not even sure about his being, or wanting to be, in the

microcosm of his solitude with the noises of silences of it, or in the macrocosm of the world. This will

be discussed more in the coming chapter.

So silence is the desired and undesired, necessary and impossible in the poems of Beckett. He has

an ambivalent attitude towards this concept as it leads to peace and at the same time erasure of self.

Self can only exist in language. But even when he wants silence to happen, he finds it impossible. This

is what Derrida has been concerned about and agreed with Beckett.

Music

One of the other main motifs Beckett is obsessed with is music. This is the reason why he chooses

poetry as his favorite genre: music is silence and language at the same time. There are no words in it

but it is not a killing silence as well. It is in the realm of heart, just like poetry: to understand music one

should give up knowledge, it is returning to the ignorance of Adam and Eve before picking up the

apple of knowledge from the tree. It is the closest language to the “pure language”, to the language of

God, as it is universal, untranslatable, and without signifying any thing other than itself. In music there

are no values and oppositions which exist in language of words.

Of course there are moments when the attitude of Beckett toward music changes, as it happens

with language and music: when he is scared of silence as it is close to nothingness, music as the sister

of silence is the source of fear for him. And when he is tired of the boundaries of language, and even

silence, he longs for music because of its threshold-like nature: between the noisy land of everything

and the wasteland of nothing, peace and struggle, being and non-being.

There are two issues about music to discuss in Beckett’s poems. One is the conceptual approach

to understand his idea about this issue which is so close to the Derridean deconstruction mainlines. The

other is based on the language of the poems which helps in learning the use of music in Beckett’s

poetry. In this reading the way Beckett deconstructs the binary opposition of language and music will

be expressed: words become musical notes and loose their meaning or value, only their sounding and

repetition makes the poem and the feeling the reader/audience gets from it. This is not that far from the

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Derridean/Beckettian definition of the poem as it id felt rather that learnt. Here the thematic reading

will be done first and then the more linguistic approach will be used.

One of the best instances of Beckett’s discussing music in his poetry is in the last poem of the

collection Echo’s Bones, of which the collection has derived its name. The poem confirms the rejection

of rhetoric. The poet has kept “on the move” as “Serena III” advised, walking on the earth that was a

muse in “Serena II” but which is now a grave. The decay of her flesh leaves Echo only her bones and

her voice, but there is still the jocularity of “muffled revels” and a breaking wind which sounds

distinctly flatulent and which no longer needs to annul the mind (as in “Enueg I”). The dry mock of the

rejected lover of Narcissus is seen to be courageous in so far as it requires commitment on the very

perilous ridge between “sense and nonsense”, but foolhardy in so far as the maggots have no problem

telling them apart, and cat the bones as a matter of course. Echo’s bones are turned to stone and she is

left with only her voice. The idea surfaces again in Embers thirty years later: “You will be quite alone

with your voice”, Ada tells Henry, “there will be no other voice in the world but yours”. And so the

volume of what on first publication were called “Sprecipitates” closes with a poem of muffled revelry

that runs the gauntlet of sense and nonsense dispassionately, “without fear or favour”. The serene tone

of “Da tagte es” has prepared us for a poem like this, and it is intended to balance the poem with which

the volume began. But to say that the “panic” of “Serena II” has been surpassed is to indicate at one

and the same moment what has been gained and what has been lost. Coming to “Cascando” from

“Echo’s Bones” one observes how far it is the voice itself, which is now being subjected to panic as the

only “trust”. This is announced in the first three lines, where the poet decides to allow the occasion of

utterance to lead where it will: “why not merely the despaired of / occasion of / wordshed”. One

compensation is that the subject-matter can be squarely faced, with none of the obliqueness we

associate with the more centrifugal poems in Echo’s Bones. Part of the “panic” is that the voice is

conscious of the sentimentality it had failed to censor in Echo’s Bones. The desired silence in “Echo’s

Bones” shows its impossibility in “Cascando” as the poet finds no way out of language and

“wordshed”. There is a late play by Beckett naming “Cascando”, which is so close in this subject to the

poem. In the play the speaker is in search of a final piece of art which can say everything he wants and

after that he will keep silence but he cannot succeed, and at last this is music.

The sixth poem of the first French collection speaks of the “musique d’indiffirence” that we

first experienced in “Echo’s Bones”, as if the poet is well aware that indifference has been under threat

in the preceding poem. The bones of Echo have now fragmented into essentials (“coeur temps air feu”;

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“heart time air fire”), expressing the “éboulement d’amours” (“atrophy of loves”). All he can do is

break the pose of indifference and make a pitiful plea to the “sable / du silence” (“sand / of silence”).

The true music, in other words, is beyond even bones as elemental as this. It is above all

utterances and silences. Music is neither of them and at the same time both of them: it stands on the

threshold of their opposition and shows that there is no black and white distinction in life, music is the

third option, the grey.

Up to now the Beckettian deconstructional reading of music looking through the content of the

poems was discussed and the following steps were taken. But to go to the other reading of the concept

of music first the poems should be read in light of formalism and then the “gaps” or “black holes”, as

Derrida calls it, which give a hint of the deconstruction of the ideas about music and language should

be found, and then an elaboration of the collapsing of the binary oppositions is needed. Although there

is no methodology in deconstruction, Paul de Man and other deconstructionalists use it consciously or

unconsciously. Here it is needed to use this second method as it is more organized and good for

focusing on the form of the poem, but this does not mean that there is a big difference in finding the

undecidability and self-deconstructiveness of Beckett’s art. Actually the first and second ways are the

same in aim, but the second has a more formalistic primary steps.

The best example of the use of music in the poems is in Roundelay and Dread nay, about which

Elizabeth Drew has written an essay. There she claims

As he indicated in conversation with Harold Hobson, Samuel Beckett was interested in the

“shape of ideas” often more than in ideas themselves (qtd. in Hobson, 153). This concern is

evident in the elaborate patterning in earlier works, but in the later part of his writing career, the

shape of expression comes to the forefront in the radical absence of the expected elements of

literary works. As Beckett’s work becomes less naturalistic and more minimalistic, shapes

provide a more significant part of the experience. The term “shape” connotes aural and

figurative patterns as well as the more obvious notion of spatial geometry. (291)

The aural shape of these poems is of a great importance and even more important than the meaning of

words, as the shape is telling in itself and there is no need for the over elaboration of language. The

“fundamental sounds” the language is reduced to in Beckett’s late poetry are acutely evident due to the

absence of distracting complexities. In Dread nay each line is divisible into a rising and falling rhythm.

Forty-eight of the poem’s sixty-four lines have only two words, and thirty lines are comprised of two

one-syllable words of equal stress. These consist of a beginning and an end, emphasizing transitions

over continuity. The entire poem creates an experience of a death-like calm being interrupted violently

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by a moment of vision, as deadening habit is intermittently interrupted by painful insights. The

difficulty in reconciling moments of vision with the times when the eyes are closed, as if the other had

“never been”, invites analogy with other unfathomable transitions, especially the shifts from non-

existence to life to death.

head fast

in out as dead

till rending

long still

faint stir

unseal the eye

till still again

seal again

............

so ere

long still

long nought

rent so

so stir

long past

head fast

in out as dead

“Roundelay”, composed in 1976, enacts the rhythm and shape of the act of walking through its aural

patterning and repetitive structure (Drew, 294).

on all that strand

at end of day

steps sole sound

long sole sound

until unbidden stay

then no sound

on all that strand

long no sound

until unbidden go

steps sole sound

long sole sound

on all that strand

at end of day

The tightly knit organization of the poem contrasts with its setting on the strand, an open space

bounded only by the expansiveness of the shifting sea. The symmetrical structure has only very subtle

difference in a few related lines. The minute variations in wording – exchanging the “stay” in line 5 for

“go” in line 9, and interchanging “sole” and “no” in several lines also linked both by the repetition of

phrases and their position in the poem – make stasis and movement (“stay” and “go”) as well as

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existence and non-existence (“sole” and “no”) seem identical.3 The formal and situational repetition in

“Roundelay” is strengthened by the tightly intertwined repetition of sounds. The consonants s, n, and d

are extraordinarily prevalent in this thirteen-line poem. Combined with the near total absence of

unstressed syllables, the aural equivalence of successive sounds mimics the beat of footsteps, the “sole

sound” on the strand. At the same time, the phonetic and rhythmic beat of the poem remains consistent

when the figure is stopped or absent, emphasizing the minuteness of the difference between movement

and stasis at the root of the self (Drew, 295).

Of course these two poems are not the only poems Beckett has used the aural faculty of the

words as a prominent aspect, and even stronger that the meaning they convey. But in these poems the

whole poem has this specification, as the meaning of the poem in general is transferred to the reader by

means of voices, while in other poems may be this has been done for a part. Here words become

musical notes and music becomes language. The binary opposition of language/music is deconstructed

as they are in need of each other and supplementary. If there was no music there would be no

communication which is the aim of language. One can go a step further and claim that music becomes

language her. On the other hand this is through the sounding of words which music takes place:

language is music in these poems. So not only the two sides of the oppositions are supplementary, but

also they are identical.

In this section the concept of music in the poems of Beckett in terms of content and form. In the

content part, music is discussed as the ultimate means of communication: it is free of translation.

Focusing on musical language of the poems, the reader can find out that the poet is rarely used the

classical musical features like rhythm and rhyme, but repetition has played the role of them and

brought music to the poems. Repetition reduces words to a voice, a musical note, which by its

repetition makes a musical piece rather than a poem.

Translation as Impossible and Necessary

Perhaps all of the poetic works he does in order to mark his patronym in his text, either in pieces

or in an integral fashion, is a means not only of misleading the reader or the detectives—the

critical detectives—but also of losing himself. Perhaps he doesn’t know his proper name.

(Derrida, Ear 106)

Translation is another linguistic-literary field with which Derrida has been so concerned. He refers to

the three phases of creation of man and world in John `s Bible. First it has been Word, and the word

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was God. So God and his name are the same and there is no distance between signifier and the signified

or referent. The first phase is the creation of light and God says “Let there be light and there was light”.

So again there is no distance. But for creation of man God used matter (mud) as well. This phase is

called Appellation or naming the things God created by man. Although things were not the words any

more but they signified the thing itself and there was no value or metaphysical meaning behind.

The second phase is called The Tree of Knowledge. Here the first fall of man appears as he,

who is banned from eating from the Tree of Knowledge, disobeys God’s word and eats it. So he/ she

gains knowledge which is metaphysical. Knowledge stands out of the context of language and is a

means to judge and put value on things. This is the first time that Adam and Eve hide themselves from

God as they feel ashamed for their being naked. This hiding is a turning point because after that man

and God are separated and man has been always in search of God from that moment on.

The Third Phase is named Tower of Bible. People of the world are gathered to build a Tower to

reach the heaven. But as God does not want them to unite or reach him destroys the tower and scatters

them all around the world with different languages.

God declares war on the tribe of the Shems, who want to make a name for themselves by raising

the tower [of Bible] and imposing their tongue on the universe.” Then “Yahweh interrupts the

construction of the tower and condemns humanity to the multiplicity of languages—which is to

say, to the necessary and impossible task of translation. (Derrida, Ear 98)

So from this stage on, man is to translate to make himself understood. But the name of God,

which is Bible, which is God himself as God is the word, cannot be translated, and at the same time it is

necessary to be translated. So the act of translating His Name is aporiaic (Nojoumian, Bible 15-23).

And Derrida claims that it is so about translating every text, as every text is idiosyncratic and like a

proper name. A text needs translation in order to survive. And if it is translated, it is neither alive nor

dead (Zende Budi, 14).

Beckett is interested in the subject of translation, as he translates others’ and his own works, in

a telling way: he treats the translation he has of others as his own work and translation of his own

works are different from the original text. The whole idea of one’s writing in one language and

translating himself is problematic as well. In Disjecta he claims

As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might

contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks

behind it—be it something or nothing—begins to seep through. (172)

Derrida has a similar idea about this subject which he explains in The Ear of the Other

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it is an operation of thought through which we must translate ourselves into the thought of the

other language, the forgotten thinking of the other language.(115)

Beckett wants to touch all the limits of language so he writes in other language and then translates. Any

translation is different and the same with the original text. That is why he calls his translation of other

poets like Mallarme his own poem: the name of his first published verse and verse translation

collection is Collected Poems, without mentioning its including translations. This clarifies his agreeing

with Derrida’s claim: “Translation is writing” (Ear 153).

Nojoumian in his essay “Jacques Derrida: Translation and the Paradox of Decadence and

Survival” claims: “Derrida sees translation as inevitable. Translation is inevitable in the sense that the

translation preserves the multiple meanings of the original text and in turn demands more translations

to create more multiple meanings” (27). Beckett’s seems to agree with this idea as his translating his

own works is writing them again and multiplying the meanings of it. This is the case with the last poem

of Quatre Poemes, where the poet puts the reader in the aporia of considering “First and last to love

me” of the English poem, synonym or antonym with “celle qui crut m’aimer” (one who thought she

loves me). I have discussed the many readings each option leads to in the previous chapter. The

multiplicity of meaning of the original text doubles in translating it, as the two texts seem to be

different with different multiple meanings. It puts the reader in the problem of considering the original

text and the translation the same and the phrases—either same or different in the two texts—carrying

the same meanings or not. But what gives Beckett the right to do so? What is the unmentioned rule of

translation that every reader accepts and considers such different texts from their originals as

translation? Derrida says “There is something ‘untouchable’, something of the original text that no

translation can attain” (Ear 114). This “untouchable” thing is what Benjamin calls “Kernel” in his “The

Task of the Translator.” As no translator, no matter he is the writer of the original or not, cannot

transform the original text to another language. There is always something missing and Beckett has

used and implied this in his verse translations. He completely knows about the untranslatability of

literature and poetry especially and tries to suggest and even abuse it by translating his own and other’s

text in a specific manner which made them quite different from the original, although it was their

translation at the same time. Derrida agrees with Beckett’s idea and act as he says “when one does

something poetic, one makes for sacredness and in that sense one produces the untranslatable” (Ear

149). And in A Letter to a Japanese Friend, where he discusses the translatability of the word

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“deconstruction”, he asserts the impossibility of translating poetry, above other texts. Literature is

sacred as “…Benjamin refers literature or poetry to a religious or sacred model, because he thinks that

if there is something untranslatable in literature [and in a certain way literature is the untranslatable],

then it is sacred” (Ear 148). Poetry is the most sublime form of literature and consequently the most

untranslatable text.

So by translating his own and other’s texts, Beckett does not mean to be loyal to their texts as it

is impossible. He just wants to help the text and the meaning behind it survive in another language for

other readers. This is the demand of each original text. “The original is in the situation of demand, that

is, of a lack or exile. The original is indebted a priori to the translation. Its survival is a demand and a

desire for translation…” (Ear 152). So the task of a translator according to Beckett, Derrida, and

Benjamin, with whom Derrida shares his ideas in The Ear of the Other, is not the task of a transformer,

he is rather a survivor.

Given the surviving structure of an original text…the task of the translator is precisely to

respond to this demand for survival which is he very structure of the original text…..The

translator must neither reproduce, represent, nor copy the original, nor even, essentially, care

about communicating the meaning of the original…a good translation is one that enacts that

performative called a promise with the result that through the translation one sees the coming

shape of a possible reconstruction among languages. (122-123)

Translation is what helps man get closer to the pure language. “[T]he translator, through the decayed

barriers of his own language, releases ‘the pure language’ ” (Nojoumian, Kinship 29). That is why

Beckett and Derrida who were so obsessed with the concept of language were so interested in

translation.

According to John Fletcher “The English version of the three [poems] that Beckett has

translated are masterly, sometimes denser than the originals and always apt ( e.g. “ in a convulsive

space” for “dans un espace pantin”)” (32). And Roger Little in “Beckett’s Poems and Verse

Translations” writes

Are the translations of Part Three[of Beckett’s “Collected Poems”], those from various French

writers, to be accorded the same importance as Beckett’s original poems, whether in French or

English? We are probably disinclined to think so, yet they figure as poems wittingly collected by

Beckett and incorporated into his canon. They furthermore form the longest and what might be

considered the culminating section of the book. (187)

Beckett deconstructs the binary opposition of original/translated text. They are supplementary

and in need of each other. “Translation does not come along in addition, like an accident added to a

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full substance; rather, it is what the original text demands” (Derrida, Ear 153). The translated text is in

need of the original as well, as its existence is based on being an original of which it is translation.

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Chapter Four: Self-deconstructiveness of Imagery

Imagery is the medium of a work of art, especially poetry. It is through stream of images, which the

author puts and arranges in a specific way the imparting of his ideas to the reader implicitly. A good

work of art uses images in different meaningful ways while no direct idea is given. The imposing of

one meaning theoretically by the author degrades the work, but by using images, through different

meanings the reader produces, all the dimensions of the author’s thought are revealed. Therefore, the

best use of imagery is the equivocal, non-clear-cut usage that enables the author and reader alike to feel

the meaning, which is never clear-cut. Of course, most of the writers, although using this kind of

imagery, try not to make the reader face with a kind of aporia in understanding the meaning and

territory of the image. But Beckett has not gone through such a work, and even has tried to make

ambiguous and ambivalent images, as the whole world and meaning are such to him. It seems that by

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doing so Beckett has imitated the reality of life and shown it to his reader perfectly. It is not clear

whether the speaker of the poems is describing a world without (Macrocosm) or the world within

(Microcosm): in some poems, the setting is a room with windows, representing the house of the mind

with eyes. This is of course one of motifs in Beckett’s art; for instance, he has used the same imagery in

Endgame. Another characteristic of Beckett’s use of imagery is that one image may have several

signifieds. The double treatment of imagery in Beckett’s poetry, which leads to a kind of Derridean

aporia and undecidability, is what the researcher is going to discuss in this chapter.

Between Two Worlds: Microcosm/ Macrocosm

In his book, Dissemination, Jacques Derrida talking about one of the poems of Mallarmé, “Le Livre,”

claims

…isn’t the book the internalization of theater, the inner stage?…in inserting a sort of spacing

into interiority, it [the mimed operation] no longer allows the inside to close upon itself or be

identified with itself…This impossibility of closure …constitutes not a reduction but a practice

of spacing. Staked on the structure of the fold and of supplementarity, this practice puts itself

into play. (243)

Here Derrida discusses the natural and necessary being of mingling the inside world with the outside

and finds these two worlds supplementary. Then the territory of the images is the territory of fold,

hymen, or threshold and the undecidability made by such imagery will lead to a play of different

meanings and lack of closure.

This is the case with Beckett’s poetry too. His imagery has the same faculty Derrida has found

in Mallarmé’s poem: whenever he is talking of an image belonging to the macrocosm, suddenly a

phrase takes the reader to the microcosm of the mind of the speaker (or vise versa). This then leaves the

reader in an aporia of deciding which world, without or within, is the world the speaker has in mind.

Certainly, putting focus on each of these two territories will lead to different meaning and, and

undecidability in choosing one will make the text open-ended.

In “Echo’s Bones” in which most of the poems are about a journey in the outside real world one

still can find references to this journeys being a search in the interior world of the speaker’s mind and

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memories. In “Vulture,” the poet suggests this: “the sky/ of my skull shell of sky and earth”. Therefore,

his skull is unrecognizable from the sky and earth and in general, the macrocosm. According to Pilling

The interpenetration of subject and object of which Beckett spoke in Proust seems here to have

been established without too much difficulty. The crushing of 'I' and 'other' into one space has

taken place before the poem begins and the theatre of action has become entirely internal. (163)

But one cannot decisively claim that the external image of the vulture is not of any value. The image

of a vulture as an object in the outside world is mingled with the image of the speaker as the artist who

eats from the corpse of the ideas and art of the other dead artists, which belongs to the internal world of

the writer. These two images are at the same time identical and different. The reader hardly can tell

them from each other and separate them and decide which world the poem belongs to: inside or

outside.

The two “Enueg” poems cover a wide area. The form is a Provençal one, embodying a

“personal or general lament or complaint” (Pilling, 164). The first poem traces the peregrinations of the

poet after he has left the hospital where his beloved is dying of tuberculosis. The escape into nature is

entirely without comfort; by a familiar poetic device the inner torment is projected on to the exterior

world.

[I] toil to the crest of the surge of the steep perilous bridge

and lapse down blankly under the scream of the hoarding

round the bright stiff banner of the hoarding

into a black west

throttled with clouds

Such is the pressure of the torment that conventional syntactic utterance goes by the board. The effect

is to situate dramatically within the poem a fragmented structure analogous to the poet's perception of

phenomena:

Above the mansions the algum trees

the mountains

my skull sullenly

clot of anger

skewered aloft strangled in the cang of the wind

bites like a dog against its chastisement.

So one can see this is not just a matter of a simple projection: speaker becomes one with his

environment and the act of separating the image of inner and outer world becomes impossible. In the

last three poems of Quatre Poemes the named location disappears, but the “threshold” situation (“these

long shifting thresholds” as Beckett calls them) remains.

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However, the undecidable images are more dominant in Beckett’s late and mature poems,

mostly French ones. The first line of the first poem of his first collection of French poems is “elles

viennent” (they come), which names the poem. But the image is not completely described, so the

women (“elles” is “they” for the women in French) can both “come” from some place in the outside

world and the speaker may be watching them, or only it is their memories which “come” to the mind of

the speaker. So here again the reader cannot tell microcosm from macrocosm.

In the fourth poem of this collection, “Ascension,” the speaker is in a room by the window,

which reminds the reader of the famous skull image of Beckett. Both the voice and image of football

fans and the child can be recollections of the interests or memories of the speaker, or the things he is

seeing from the window if his eyes, rather than the window of his room. The window is shut on the

eyes of the late girl, open wide with surprise. Therefore, by analogy, as the speaker closes his eyes, and

sinks in himself, he remembers the memory of his first love. (Translations are by Pilling, printed in his

book Samuel Beckett)

with his filthy fingers he closed the lids

on her green eyes wide with surprise

she delicately rides

my tomb of air

Anyhow, none of the discussed ideas about this poem is superior to the first meaning of image

coming to the mind—a man in his room watching outside. Therefore again the reader faces the

threshold-like setting of the work, a place between the world without and within and encounters

another aporia.

In the fifth poem, the poet is nowhere and everywhere, like the first poem. He can be in the

microcosm and longing for silence of the memories, talking to his other, inside himself, asking it to

cover the voices of the essentials (“coeur temps air feu”; “heart time air fire”), expressing the

'éboulement d'amours' (“atrophy of loves”), as his internal world is noisy when he is silent in the

external world. Or else, he can be in the macrocosm and talking to some external others who do not

stop talking and make him sink in his memories( according to Harvey, people in a party).He wants

these other men keep silence so that he can keep on thinking and be not silent in his internal world.

cover their voices so

that I may hear no more

me silent

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Again the reader cannot decide which image, and therefore, what reading is more proper, as

both are implied in the work, and even are supplementary for each other, so he remains in his aporia.

Beckett is one of the few thinkers and writers who could digest the true essence of life, which is

undecidability, indifference and aporia, and could reflect it to the readers.

The next poem repeats this ambivalence: “enfermé chez soi enfermé chez eux” (shut up at home

shut up by themselves) [my translation], be putting these two besides, shows both their being same and

different at the same time. This may simply mean being lonely at home, but besides, it can suggest that

home is the mind of a man who is alone and by himself.

In the eleventh poem of this collection, the theme of undecidability of the place and its being

somewhere between microcosm and macrocosm is again dominant. The speaker is looking at his

embodied memories in his house of mind.

From where we are seated higher than the tiers

I see us enter from the Rue des Arènes side,

halt, look up, then ponderously

come towards us across the dark sand,

more and more ugly, ugly like the others, but silent.

At last, the reader finds it contradictory as after the speaker being retired from remembering, the girl is

beside him in flesh so microcosm is mingled with the macrocosm.

I shiver, it is I rejoining me,

it is with other eyes that I now see

the sand, the puddles underneath the drizzle,

a little girl dragging her hoop behind her,

a couple, lovers who knows, hand in hand,

the empty tiers, the lofty houses, and the sky

that lights us up too late.

I return to myself, I am surprised

to find her sad face there.

Pilling, too, suggests these two interpretations of the images, which lead to aporia as he claims:

“[this poem is] delicately, but not sentimentally, describing the movements of an eye that perceives its

owner as object” (176). This dividedness of the self is one of the main motifs of Beckett’s art as

elaborated in his Unnamable: “There were four or five of them [selves] at me” (14).

However, at the same time Pilling finds the poem a story in the external world of two people—

the speaker and a girl: “They separate for a moment, and the man makes his way to the position he is

occupying in the first line of the poem. The woman hesitates, takes a step towards the exit, and then

follows him. They meet face to face”(176). So are the “other eyes” at the same time the eyes of the

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author and the eyes of the girl? Is the speaker experiencing the sameness with his beloved? It can be the

case, but the most related reading to this chapter is that the real external experience is inseparable from

the memories of the speaker. The speaker is watching this memory like a film so he is literally viewing

himself. But at the same time the girl exists physically which surprises the speaker. One cannot tell the

world without from the world within. Of course, some oversimplifying readings may exist like the

speaker being detached from himself first but at last rejoining himself and finding peace in the external

world. According to Pilling again

In one sense, this is Beckett's most optimistic poem since “Alba” in that it envisages the

possibility of contentment from something outside the self, but it is at the same time one of his

most depressing accounts of the persistence of memory and the passing of time. Only in art, the

interpenetration of subject and object, can one catch a glimpse of paradise. (177)

So this easy reading of finding a “possibility of contentment from something outside” is rejected by

Pilling. Here as Deconstruction is being applied to the texts, none of the readings, no matter how

irrelevant they are, will not be put aside but some new, more problematic readings are suggested as

above.

As we saw, distinguishing the world the images belong to—microcosm and macrocosm—is an

impossible task in reading Beckett’s poetry. According to Harvey, his images belong to a place

“between two worlds.” The reason why this threshold is mostly found in his French Poetry is its calm

static atmosphere, which reminds of the prolepsis of the mind of the speaker. According to Elizabeth

Drew

The beauty of Beckett’s work lies in his way of putting forth in time and space, through sound

and image, the essence of the condition of a timeless inner self. His late works train a macro lens

on this conflict, generating a sense of space and moment in the immaterial territory of the mind.

(292)

But as mentioned above, in his more dynamic early poems, there exist such moments of

mingling outside with inside world in a way that one cannot be separated from the other. The reader

has to accept both A. and Not A., the two poles of the binary opposition of in/out at the same time, as

supplements.

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Equivocal Images

The images of Beckett are problematic and self-deconstructive and undecidable but not just because of

the ambivalence between the two internal and external world place of reference of the images. Even

when they belong to a place in the physical world, one cannot consider them as a single image referring

to a fixed idea. Moreover, it is not the simple case of one image signifying several meanings. The

Beckettian image is in itself multiple, and each single image is supplementary for the other.

…the supplement supplements. It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-

place of; if it fills, it is as one fills a void. if it represents and makes and image, it is by the

interior default of a presence. Compensatory[suppléant] and vicarious, the supplement is an

adjust, a subaltern instance which takes-(the)-place[tient-lieu]. As substitute, it is not simply

added to the possitivity of a presence, it produces no relief, its place is assigned in the structure

by the mark of an emptiness.

(Derrida, Acts 83)

So no image is prior to the other or fill the emptiness completely. The reader cannot simply take each

image he/she wants, as it shatters the totality of the poem, but has to stay in the aporia made by this

multiplicity. The text then finds no closure and signification undergoes the matter of différance.

Derrida claims:

The ultimate aporia is the impossibility of the aporia as such. The reservoir of this statement

seems to me incalculable. This statement is made with and reckons with the incalculable itself.

(Derrida, Aporias 78)

This is the aporia Beckett tries to approach in his poems, through his ambivalent undecidable imagery.

In “Vulture,” the image of a vulture is mingled with the image of the speaker as an artist who

uses the dead memories or the art and subject of dead artists as his own material. The problem of

choosing between these two images is completely irresolvable: this dialectic cannot have any synthesis,

as having it will lead to a loss of meaning the poem tries to approach.

Even the colors do not have the fixed, preoccupied significance in Beckett’s imagery.

According to Harvey

In “Enueg I” The color green, so often associated with spring, hope, rebirth is linked with death

and decay (“the stillborn evening turning a filthy green…. /the great mushy toadstool, green-

black, oozing up after me”). The green tulips in “Enueg II” are also part of an atmosphere of

physical and moral sickness and suffering.(120)

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This changing of the signified a signifier refers to, which is quite a revolutionary act, cannot be done

completely. The signifieds are multiplied, not replaced. The common significances of green (“spring,

hope, rebirth”) still exist, but the significance of death is added to them and have made them find a new

meaning. There is a link between rebirth and death, which is made by green: for Beckett death is in life,

there is no clear division between them, but man is always on the threshold of death and life. Therefore,

green here is a metaphor for this threshold and the two area it links, the two opposite meanings it has in

itself, are mingled and even are supplementary for each other, as life and death. As a result, here the

binary opposition collapses which shows the self-deconstructiveness in the work.

In “Da Tagte Es,” the sheet in hand makes two images at the same time, one is a sexual image,

the second is the image of a sheet or handkerchief shaken good-bye for a beloved one who is leaving

the land for somewhere else, or even for the underworld.

the sheet astream in your hand

and the glass unmisted above your eyes

redeem the surrogate goodbyes

It is just through putting these two images together that the reader can understand the idea of the

speaker/writer about love and love making, strongly associated with death and loss. Therefore, the

supplementary being of the images is clear. The undecidability in making any choice between images

and the aporia situation is used intentionally by the author and that is what makes his work self-

deconstructive.

In the third poem from the first French collection, there are two images, one of getting ready for

a sexual intercourse, the other of crying, both needed for getting to the desired meaning and both

dependent on each other.

In “let her moisten/as long as she likes till the elegy” the speaker again implies the association

of love and death, and the two images should necessarily be together without any priority to each other

so that the idea can be transferred to the reader completely. The act of waiting in the poem can be both

for lovemaking and for death and is suggested by the use of the undecidability in choosing one of these

images.

Another example is “Calvary by Night”, from Jettisoned Poems, in which the image is at the

same time the image of a blossom and its short life reminding of the brevity of man’s life, and the

71

image of firework at night which is similar to a blossom in form pointing satirically to the life of man

with its ridiculous pleasures. Harvey claims the poem “ may well suggest every man’s hard journey

through darkness of life to his destiny as victim, but it can also slip towards the satirical, for it is

vaguely reminiscent of travel posters advertising tourist delights: ‘ See Paris by Night’” (275). These

two simultaneous meanings are in hand thanks to the two inseparable images.

rocket of bloom flare flower of night wilt for me

on the breasts of the water it has closed it has made

an act of floral presence on the water

the tranquil act of its cycles on the waste

from the spouting forth

to the re-enwombing

an untroubled bow of petal and fragrance

kingfished abated

drown for me

Lamb of my insustenance

So it is through this multiplicity of images, and as a result multiplicity of meanings that the

speaker, and by sequence the author, reaches his desired aporia which is the essence of human life.

Each signifier (image) is a trace of other signifiers and cannot survive without them and be meaningful,

although they may be absent and far from mind. Beckett himself in the second poem of his first

collection of French poems says “absence/ in the service of the presence” (my translation). Therefore,

to him this absence of the clear dominant image and as a result a clear meaning is what gives his

present work and image a meaning. That is the gist of the idea of absence and supplement by Derrida

Through this sequence of supplements a necessity is announced: that of an infinite chain,

ineluctably multiplying the supplementary meditations that produce the sense of the very thing

they defer: the mirage of the thing itself, of immediate presence, of originary perception.

Immediacy is derived. That all begins through the intermediary is what is indeed “inconceivable

to reason.” (Derrida, Acts 100)

It is this absence of a fixed reality, supplementary being of each pole of the binary opposition the

images belong to, and the undecidability and aporia in taking one as the prior is what makes Beckett’s

images in his poetry self- deconstructive.

The reduction of the images the poet sees/describes gets to its prime in the latest poems. In

“Something There” there is an outside versus inside image again: “the whole globe/ Not bare yet”, and

“the eyes open wide.” The character in the poem looks from inside to the outside, and escapes inside,

he in listening to a promising voice which says of “something there”, another territory, “not

72

life/Necessarily.” The source of this voice is not clear, there is a dialogue in the poem and that is all the

reader is sure about. This voice can be the voice of one of the selves in the character, and can be the

voice of a person outside, as the globe is not bare yet. This reminds us of “Endgame”, with the idea of

the eyes as windows in the setting of the stage, an apocalyptic outside with a boy surviving, versus the

inside several voices of the characters of the drama, who can be the several selves of the one, whose

eyes are the windows. It is as if Beckett has taken us into the mind of man. But nonetheless it is not

easy to say outside from inside clearly any how, as the presence of the characters is from time to time

more colorful that the idea of their being a part of the absent one they are in it, although it is not a real

absence as his mind is present as the stage.

The look towards outside lasts “Till in the end/ Nothing more/Shutters it again.” At last, the

outside world with its all threads vanishes, and the character remains with his eyes fixed on something

out when there is nothing out there, this nothing is “not life/ necessarily”: lack of any image is death or

non-life.

Beckett looses his interest in images, either internal or external, as he gets to the end of his

career/life. In the last piece of writing of his life, which is the poem “What is the word”, there is no

particular image, the speaker talks of “there”, “here”, and other time and place pronouns but the

reference of none of them is clear, it is as if he is standing in the middle of nowhere and no time.

Therefore, in this chapter, the dedication of undecidable images— in terms of both the world

they belonged to and their being multiple in themselves— to the self-deconstructiveness of the poems

was clarified. By using this kind of imagery, Beckett tries to make the reader recognize the

unrecognizable. It is this aporia of the reader, which is so close to the aporia man experiences in his

daily life. Beckett has shown this in the best way possible, but most of the writers have tried to put it

under erasure and Derrida, beside other deconstructionalists, to be with Beckett, and self-

deconstructiveness of his works (Derrida, Acts 60), become clear, as the two thinkers, both in their own

way, want to show the impossible and simultaneously quest for it in life.

73

Chapter Five: Conclusion

Findings

In order to show the impossibility of making decision, in order to create situations of pure 'aporia',

Beckett takes a logic of both/and, the two choices of which are contradictory and opposite. In his

poetry the attitude he has toward some main motifs of life, language and images support this idea. His

time is both healer and killer; it gives and takes life at the same time. Death to him is not another state,

it is in life, and is even a supplement for it. The subject is both dead and alive in his poems. Talking

about identity, man is both himself and other, and is always in an aporia of defining himself. Eroticism

and physical love is to him a supplement for divine love, coming to the concept of love in the poems of

Beckett. Physical love and spiritual love are the two sides of a binary opposition which are in need of

each other and both form what real love is according to the poet. Here the boundaries between the two

seemingly contracting ideas vanish, and the reader is left with the aporia of telling erotic love from the

platonic one.

Focusing on language, his shattered syntax relate to the displacements of limits of language

which deconstructs it. The poetics of Beckett in his poetry is that of failure. He is aware of the

incapability and failure of language is transferring meaning, and shows it by exaggerating this problem.

He uses repetition, which makes the text static and dynamic at the same time, as a repeated word is a

new word too, because the context has changed. This can be extended to the idea of repetitiveness of

74

time, which makes defining undecidable. The shattered syntax takes language to its edge, to a state

between language and non-language. His syntax leads to aporia of reader in choosing one out of the

many readings it may suggest and lack of closure, which is a main but exaggerated characteristic of

language. But besides, in this syntax there is no grammar and rule, which are the main characteristics of

language and define it. The silence which is implied both in form and content of the works is discussed

as impossible and necessary. Silence is a form of speech so what we know as silence is both voice and

voicelessness. Besides, the peace suggested by death sometimes becomes horrifying and death-like:

sometimes the speaker of the poems becomes death-wishing and wants silence, but there are times

which he is scared of the loss of presence and through it. Therefore there is and ambivalent mood

regarding the uncatchable silence. Music is the best form of speech, which is not speech at the same

time, to Beckett. Music is not silence but is not language too. But it has the some part of both. The lack

of words is borrowed from silence and the communication from language. In this view it is even the

best and purest language as it does not need any translation and is universal. In his translations even,

Beckett uses the idea of both A and not A. His translations, either from himself or from the others, are

both translation and non-translation. They are not original texts as they are a loose transference of

another text in another language, into another language. But they are different from them in both form

and content. Their language stands somewhere between the two languages and the reader will live the

aporia of naming them translation or not.

The purgatorial images as well as the sense of waiting and suspension which are always present

in his poetry relate to Derrida's notion of 'différance'. The undecidability of time and waiting for the

‘proper time’ to come, leads to paralysis and purgatorial images. The ‘best time’ differs and defers, it is

always to come and one cannot stop waiting for it. Therefore waiting in the Beckett’s art is a Derridean

matter of différance.

The undecidable setting of the images, the place between the microcosm and macrocosm,

contributes to self-deconstructiveness in Beckett’s poetry. His imagery either belongs to somewhere

between his inner microcosm and skull with its silence and monologues, which are closer to a

dialogues between his several selves, or the macrocosm of world without. It is as if he is standing on

the threshold of the two images and worlds. And even in the poems that the reader can decisively say

the poet is standing the outside world, there are still several significances of a single image which

mostly represent contradicting ideas like mourning and a lively love making. By the use of such

75

images, he deconstructs the idea behind each signified and shows its supplementariness with the other

significances of each image. Besides, he leaves the reader with the aporia of choosing one signified

over the other and relating the image to a particular meaning.

This logic of both A and not A, as the shaping principle of his work, provide him with a critique

of the metaphysics of presence which is based upon the binary oppositions. He has been a great thinker

and philosopher besides being a literature man. Of course literature and philosophy have never been

apart from each other, but philosophy has always tried to deny it. Derrida could show that philosophy is

in need of literature and their binary opposition is vicious, as without literary language and figures of

speech philosophy can get to nowhere and literature without having a though behind is nothing but a

play with words. He deconstructed the western philosophy by this logic in his half literary, half

philosophical texts. Beckett has done the very same thing in his poetry.

Having all these theories hidden behind the surface of poetry in mind, one can easily understand

why Harvey has named his book on the poems of Beckett Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic. He stands

somewhere between these two seemingly opposite social roles, his being is deconstruction of this

binary opposition. He deconstructs some rigid beliefs in life, besides his own texts, sharing the style

and thinking-system of Derrida. That is why Derrida finds him close to himself and Attridge claims his

art is self-deconstructive.

76

Appendices: Poems by Samuel Beckett

Whoroscope

What’s that?

An egg?

By the brothers Boot it stinks fresh.

Give it to Gillot.

Galileo how are you

and his consecutive thirds!

The vile old Copernican lead-swinging son of a

sutler!

We’re moving he said we’re off-Porca

Madonna!

the way a boatswain would be, or a sack-of-

potatoey charging Pretender.

That’s not moving, that’s moving. 10

What’s that?

A little green fry or a mushroomy one?

Two lashed ovaries with prostisciutto?

How long did she womb it, the feathery one?

Three days and four nights?

Give it to Gillot.

Faulhaber, Beeckman and Peter the Red,

come now in the cloudy avalanche or Gassendi’s

sun-red crystally cloud

and I’ll pebble you all your hen-and-a-half ones

or I’ll pebble a lens under the quilt in the midst

of day. 20

To think he was my own brother, Peter the

Bruiser,

and not a syllogism out of him

no more than if Pa were still in it.

Hey! pass over those coppers,

sweet millèd sweat of my burning liver!

Them were the days I sat in the hot-cupboard

throwing Jesuits out of the skylight.

Who’s that? Hals?

Let him wait.

My squinty doaty!

I hid and you sook. 30

And Francine my precious fruit of a house-and-

77

parlour foetus!

What an exfoliation!

Her little grey flayed epidermis and scarlet

tonsils!

My one child

scourged by a fever to stagnant murky blood—

blood!

Oh Harvey belovèd

how shall the red and white, the many in the

(dear bloodswirling Harvey)

eddy through that cracked beater? 40

And the fourth Henry came to the crypt of the

arrow.

What’s that?

How long?

Sit on it?

A wind of evil flung my despair of ease

against the sharp spires of the one

lady:

not once or twice but….

(Kip of Christ hatch it!)

in one sun’s drowning 50

(Jesuitasters please copy).

So on with the silk hose over the knitted, and

the morbid leather—

what am I saying! the gentle cavas—

and away to Ancona on the bright Adriatic,

and farewell for a space to the yellow key of

the Rosicrucians.

They don’t know what the master of them that

do it,

that the nose is touched by the kiss of all foul

and sweet air,

and the drums, and the throne of the fæcal

inlet,

and the eyes by its zig-zags.

So we drink Him and eat Him 60

and the watery Beaune and the stale cubes of

Hovis

because He can jig

as near or as far from His Jigging Self

and as sad or lively as the chalice or the tray asks.

How’s that, Antonio?

In the name of Bacon will you chicken me up

that egg.

Shall I swallow cave-phantoms?

Anna Maria!

78

She reads Moses and says her love is crucified.

Leider! Leider! she bloomed and withered, 70

a pale abusive parakeet in a mainstreet window.

No I believe every word of it I assure you.

Fallor, ergo sum!

The coy old frôleur!

He tolle’d and legge’d

and he buttoned on his redemptorist waistcoat.

No matter, let it pass.

I’m a bold boy I know

so I’m not my son

(even if I were a concierge) 80

nor Joachim my father’s

but the chip of a perfect block that’s neither old

nor new,

the lonely petal of a great high bright rose.

Are you ripe at last,

my slim pale double-breasted turd?

How rich she smells,

this abortion of a fledgling!

I will eat it with a fish fork.

White and yolk and feathers.

Then I will rise and move moving 90

toward Rahab of the snows

the murdering matinal pope-confessed amazon,

Christiana the ripper.

Oh Weulles spare the blood of a Frank

who has climbed the bitter steps,

(René du Perron….!)

and grant me my second

starless inscrutable hour.

Notes

René Descartes, Seigneur du Perron, liked his omelette made of eggs hatched from eight to ten days; shorter or

longer under the hen and the result, he says, is disgusting.

He kept his own birthday to himself so that no astrologer could cast his nativity.

The shuttle of a ripening egg combs the warp of his days.

Line(s) 3 In 1640 the brothers Boot refuted Aristotle in Dublin.

4 Descartes passed on the easier problems in analytic geometry to his valet Gillot.

5-10 Refer to his contempt for Galileo Jr., (whom he confused with the more musical Galileo Sr.), and to his

expedient sophistry concerning the movement of the earth.

17 He solved the problem submitted by these mathematicians.

21-26 The attempt at swindling on the part of his elder brother Pierre de la Bretaillière— The money he

received as a soldier.

27 Franz Hals

29-30 As a child he played with a little cross-eyed girl.

79

31-35 His daughter died of scarlet fever at the age of six.

37-40 Honoured Harvey for his discovery of the circulation of the blood, but would not admit that he had

explained the motion of the heart.

41 The heart of Henri iv was received at the Jesuit college of La Flèche while Descartes was still a student

there.

45-53 His visions and pilgrimage to Loretto.

56-63 His Eucharistic sophistry, in reply to the Jansenist Antonio Arnauld, who challenged him to reconcile his

doctrine of matter with the doctrine of transubstantiation.

68 Schurmann, the Dutch blue-stocking, a pious pupil of Voët, the adversary of Descartes.

73-76 Saint Augustine has a revelation in the shrubbery and reads Saint Paul.

77-83 He proves God by exhaustion.

91-93 Christina, queen of Sweden. At Stockholm, in November, she required Descartes, who had remained in

bad till midday all his life, to be with her at five o’clock in the morning.

94 Weulles, a Peripatetic Dutch physician at the Swedish court, and an enemy of Descartes.

Jettisoned Poems Gnome

Spend the years of learning squandering

Courage for the years of wandering

Through the world politely turning

From the loutishness of learning.

Oofish

offer it up plank it down

Golgotha was only the potegg

cancer angina it is all one to us

cough up your T.B. don’t be stingy

no trifle is too trifling not even a thrombus

anything venereal is especially welcome

that old toga in the mothballs

don’t be sentimental you won’t be wanting it again

send it along we’ll put it in the pot with the rest

with your love requited and unrequited

the things taken too late the things taken too soon

the spirit aching bullock’s scrotum

you won’t cure it again— you won’t endure it

it is you it equals you any fool has to pity you

so parcel up the whole issue and send it along

the whole misery diagnosed undiagnosed misdiagnosed

get your friends to the same we’ll make use of it

we’ll make sense of it we’ll put it in the pot with

the rest

it all boils down to the blood of the lamb

Calvary by Night

the water

80

the waste of water

in the womb of water

an pansy leaps

rocket of bloom flare flower of night wilt for me

on the breasts of the water it has closed it has made

an act of floral presence on the water

the tranquil act of its cycles on the waste

from the spouting forth

to the re-enwombing

an untroubled bow of petal and fragrance

kingfished abated

drown for me

Lamb of my insustenance

till the clamour of a blue flower

beat on the walls of the womb of

the waste of

the water

Casket of Pralinen for a Daughter of a Dissipated Mandarin

Is he long enough in the leg?

Già but his faice….

oh me little timid Rosinette

isn’t it Bartholo, synthetic grey cat, regal candle?

Keep Thyrsis for your morning ones.

Hold your head well over the letter darling

or they’ll fall on the blotting.

Will you ever forget that soupe arrosée

on the first of the first,

spoonfeeding the weeping gladiator

renewing our baptismal vows

and dawn cracking all along the line

Slobbery assumption of the innocents

two Irish in one God.

Radiant lemon-whiskered Christ

and you obliging porte-phallic-portfolio

and blood-faced Tom

disbelieving

in the Closerie cocktail that is my

and of course John the bright boy of the class

swallowing an apostolic spit

THE BULLIEST FEED IN ‘ISTORY

if the boy scouts hadn’t booked a trough

for the eleventh’s eleventh eleven years after.

Now me boy

take a hitch in your lyrical loinstring.

81

What is this that is more

than the anguish of Beauty,

this gale of pain that was not prepared

in the caves of her eyes?

Is it enough

a stitch in the hem of the garment of God?

To-night her gaze would be less

than a lark’s barred sunlight.

Oh I am ashamed

of all clumsy artistry

I am ashamed of presuming

to arrange words

of everything but the ingenious fibers

that suffer honestly.

Fool! do you hope to untangle

the knot of God’s pain?

Melancholy Christ that was a soft one!

Oh yes I think that was perhaps just a very little

inclined to be rather too self-consious.

Schluss!

Now ladies and gents

a chocolate-coated hiccough to our old friend.

Put on your hats and sit easy.

Oh beauty!

oh thou predatory evacuation,

from the bowels of my regret—

readily affected

by the assimilation of a purging gobbet

from my memory’s involuntary vomit—

violently projected,

oh beauty!

oh innocent and spluttering beautiful!

What price the Balbee express?

Albio Albion mourn for him mourn

thy cockerup Willy the idiot boy

the portly scullion’s codpiece.

Now who’ll discover in Mantegna’s

butchery stout foreshortened Saviour

recognitions of transcendent

horse-power?

Sheep he wrote the very much doubting

genial illegible landscape gardener.

Gloucester’s no bimbo

and he’s in Limbo

82

so all’s well with the gorgonzola cheese of human

kindness.

Though the swine were slaughtered

beneath the waves

not far from the firm sand

they’re gone they’re gone

my Brussels Braut!

A Sonnet Taken from Dream of Fair to Middling Women

At last I find in my confusèd soul,

Dark with the dark flame of the cypresses,

The certitude that I cannot be whole,

Consummate, finally achieved, unless

I be consumed and fused in the white heat

Of her sad finite essence, so that none

Shall sever us who are at last complete

Eternally, irrevocably one,

One with the birdless, cloudless, colourless skies,

One with the bright purity of the fire

of which we are and for which we must die

A rapturous strange death and be entire,

Like syzygetic stars, supernly bright,

Conjoined in One and in the Infinite!

Text

Miserere oh colon

oh passionate ilium

and Frances the cook in the study mourning

an abstract belly

instead of the writhing asparagus-plumer

smashed on delivery

by the most indifferential calculus

that never came out

or ever disdressed

a redknuckled slut of a Paduan Virtue.

Show that plate here to your bedfruit

spent baby

and take a good swig

at our buxom calabash.

There’s more than bandit Glaxo

underneath me maternity toga.

So she sags and here’s the other.

83

That’s the real export or I’m a jungfrau.

Now wipe your moustache and hand us the vaseline.

Open Thou my lips

and

(if one dare make a suggestion)

Thine eye of skyflesh.

Am I a token of Godcraft?

The masterpiece of a scourged apprentice?

Where is my hippopot’s cedar tail?

and belly muscles?

Shall I cease to lament

being not as the flashsneezing

non-suppliant airtight alligator?

Not so but perhaps

at the sight and the sound of

a screechy flatfooted Tuscany peacock’s

Strauss fandango and recitative

not forgetting

he stinks eternal.

Quick tip losers narcissistic inverts.

Twice I parted two crawlers

dribbling their not connubial strangles

in Arcadia of all places.

Believe me Miss Ops

swan flame or shower of gold.

its one to ten at the time

(no offence to your noble deathjerks)

I know I was at it seven…

the bitch she’s blinded me!

Manto me dear

an iced sherbet and me blood’s a solid.

We are proud in our pain

our life was not blind.

Worms breed in their red tears

as they slouch by unnamed

scorned by the black ferry

despairing of death

who shall not scour in swift joy

the bright hill’s girdle

nor tremble with the dark pride of torture

and the bitter dignity of an ingenious damnation.

Lo-Ruhama Lo-Ruhama

pity is quick with death.

Presumptuous passionate fool come now

to the sad maimed shades

and stand cold

on the cold moon.

84

HOME OLGA

J might be made sit up for a jade of hope(and exile,

don’t you know)

And Jesus and Jesuits juggernauted in the haemorrhoidal

isle,

Modo et forma anal maiden, giggling to death in

stomacho.

E for the erythrite of love and silence and the sweet

noo style,

Swoops and loops of love and silence in the eye of the

sun and view of the mew,

Juvante Jah and a Jain or two and the tip of a friendly

yiddophile.

O for an opal of faith and cunning winking adieu,

adieu, adieu;

Yesterday shall be tomorrow, riddle me that my

rapparee;

Che sarà sarà che fu, there’s more than Homer knows

how to spew,

Exempli gratia: ecce himself and the pickthank agnus-

e.o.o.e.

FOR FUTURE REFERENCE

My cherished chemist friend

lured me aloofly

down from the cornice

into the basement

and there:

drew bottles of acid and alkali out of his breast

to a colourscale accompaniment

(mad dumbells spare me!)

fiddling deft and expert

with the doubled jointed nutcrackers of the hen’s ovaries

But I stilled my cringing

and smote him

yes oh my strength!

smashed

mashed

(peace my incisors!)

flayed and crushed him

with a ready are you steady

cuff-discharge.

But did I?

And then the bright waters

beneath the broad board

the trembling blade of the streamlined divers

85

and down to our waiting

to my enforced buoyancy

came floating the words of

the mutilator

and the work of his fingerjoints:

observe gentlemen one of

the consequences of the displacement of

(click)!

the muncher.

The hair shall be grey

above the left temple

the hair shall be grey there

abracadabra!

sweet wedge of birds faithless!

God blast you yes it is we see

God bless you professor

we can’t clap or we’d sink

three cheers for the perhaps pitiful professor

next per shaving? next per sh…………………..?

Well of all the…………………………………..!

that little bullet-headed bristle-cropped

red-faced rat of a pure mathematician

that I thought was experimenting with barbed wire in

the Punjab

up he comes surging to the landing steps

and tells me I’m putting no guts in my kick.

Like this he says like this.

Well I just swam out nimbly

blushing and hopeless

with the little swift strokes that I like and……..

whoops!

over the stream and the tall green bank

in a strong shallow arch

and his face all twisted calm and patient

and the board ledge doing its best to illustrate

Bruno’s identification of contraries

into the water or on to the stone?

No matter at all he can’t come back

from far bay or stony ground

yes here he is

(he must have come under)

for the second edition

coming

house innings set half or anything…………...

if he can’t come twice

or forgets his lesson

or breaks his leg

he might forget me

they all might……………………………….!

86

so the snowy floor of the parrot’s cell

burning at dawn

the palaiate of my strange mouth.

HELL CRANE TO STARLING

Oholiba charm of my eyes

there is a cave above Tsoar

and a Spanish donkey there.

You needn’t bring wine to that non-relation.

And he won’t know

who changed his name

when Jehovah sprained the seam of his haunch

in Peniel in penile

after he’s sent on the thirty camels

suckling for dear death

and so many fillies

that I don’t want log tablets.

Mister Jacobson mister Hippolitus-in-hell Jacobson

we all know

how you tried to rejoin your da.

Bilha always blabs.

Because Benoni skirted aftercrop

of my aching loins

you’ll never see him

reddening the wall in two dimensions

and if you did

you might spare the postage to Chaldea.

But there’s a bloody fine ass

lepping with stout and impurée de pommes

in the hill above Tsoar.

FROM THE ONLY POET TO A SHINING WHORE

For Henry Crowder to sing.

Rahab of the holy battlements,

bright dripping shaft

in the bright bright patient

pearl-brow dawn-dusk lover of the sun.

Puttanina mia!

You hid them happy in the high flax,

pale before the fords

87

of Jordan, and the dry red waters,

and you lowered a pledge

of scarlet hemp.

Oh radiant, oh angry, oh Beatrice,

she foul with the victory

of the bloodless fingers

and proud, and you, Beatrice, mother, sister,

daughter, beloved,

fierce pale flame

of doubt, and God’s sorrow,

and my sorrow.

RETURN TO THE VERSITY

Lover

off with your braces

Slouch in unbuttoned ease

fill a sack take a porter climb a mountain

as he did

the deaf conceited lecherous laypriest

the vindictive old sausage-sprinkler

dirt in a dirt floor

in a chapel barn

by a stifled stream

Zoroaster

politely factorized

and a hay-rake

guarantee his siesta

except during the harvest season when the

latter is removed.

I may be mistaken

but—

tears covering all risks—

I took a time exposure

and wept into my hat

So

swell the cairn and spill the doings,

Burn sulphur!

Jupiter flame to a swirl of ashes!

Down the Singer

I’m done with stitch anguish.

Now a compress of wormwood and verbena

on my fiery buttocks

Smother the place in Cerebos it stinks of breeding.

Here’s the mange of beauty in a corporation bucket!

Shovel it into the winds!

Loose the sparrows.

Pluck that pigeon she dribbles fertility.

Mumps and a orchid to Fräulein Miranda.

88

Gentle Anteros

dark and dispassionate

come a grave snake with peace to my quarry

and choke my regret

noble Anteros

and coil at the door of my quarry tomb

and span its rim with a luminous awning

shallow and dim

as a grey tilt of sil

filtering sadly

the weary triumph of morning.

Or mock a duller impurity.

YOKE OF LIBERTY

The lips of her desire are grey

and parted like a silk loop

threatening

a slight wanton wound.

She preys wearily

on sensitive wild things

proud to be torn

by the grave crouch of her beauty.

But she will die and her snare

tendered so patiently

to my tamed watchful sorrow

will break and hang

in a pitiful crescent.

Echo's Bones

The Vulture

dragging his hinger through the sky

of my skull shell of sky and earth

strooping to the prone who must

soon take up their life and walk

mocked by a tissue that may not serve

till hunger earth and sky be offal

Enueg I

Exeo in a spasm

tired of my darling's red sputum

from the Portobello Private Nursing Home

it secret things

89

and toil to the crest of the surge of the steep perilous bridge

and lapse down blankly under the scream of the hoarding

round the bright stiff banner of the hoarding

into a black west

throttled with clouds.

Above the mansions the algum-trees

the mountains

my skull sullenly

clot of anger

skewered aloft strangled in the cang of the wind

bites like a dog against its chastisement.

I trundle along rapidly now on my ruined feet

flush with the livid canal;

at Parnell Bridge a dying barge

carrying a cargo of nails and timber

rocks itself softly in the foaming cloister of th lock;

on the far bank a gang of down and outs would seem to be mending a beam.

Then for miles only wind

and the weals creeping alongside on the water

and the world opening up to the south

across a travesty of champaign to the mountains

and the stillborn evening turning a filthy green

manuring the night fungus

and the mind annulled

wrecked in wind.

I splashed past a little wearish old man,

Democritus,

scuttling along between a crutch and a stick,

his stump caught up horrible, like a claw, under his breech,

smoking.

Then because a field on the left went up in a sudden blaze

of shouting and urgent whisttling and scarlet and blue ganzies

I stopped and climbed the bank to see the game.

A child fidgeting at the gat called up:

"Would we be let in Mister?"

"Certainly" I said "you would."

But, afraid, he set off down the road.

"Well" I called after him "why wouldn't you go in?"

"Oh" he said, knowingly,

"I was in that field before and I got put out."

So on,

derelict,

as from a bush of gorse on fire in the mountain after dark,

or, in Sumatra, the jungle hymen,

the still flagrant rafflesia.

Next:

90

a lamentable family of grey verminous hens,

perishing out in the sunk field,

trembling, half asleep, against the closed door of a shed,

with no means of roosting.

The great mushy toadstool,

green-black,

oozing up after me,

soaking up the tatteres sky like an ink of pestilence,

in my skull the wind going fetid,

the water . . .

Next:

on the hill down from the Fox and Gesse into Chapelizod

a small malevolent goat, exiled on the road,

remotely pucking the gate of his field;

the Isolde Stores a great perturbation of sweaty heroes,

in their Sunday best,

come hastening down for a pint of nepenthe or moly of half and half

from watching the hurlers above in Kilmainham.

Blotches of doomed yellow in the pit of the Liffey;

the fingers of the ladders hooked over the parapet,

soliciting;

a slush of vigilant gulls in the grey spew of the sewer.

Ah the banner

the banner of meat bleeding

on the silk of the seas and the arctic flowers

that do not exist.

Enueg II

world world world world

and the face grave

cloud against the evening

de morituris nihil nisi

and the face crumbling shyly

too late to darken the sky

blushing away into the evening

shuddering away like a gaffe

veronica mundi

veronica munda

give us a wipe for the love of Jesus

sweating like Judas

tired of dying

91

tired of policemen

feet in marmalade

perspiring profusely

heart in marmalade

smoke more fruit

the old heart the old heart

breaking outside congress

?

doch I assure thee

lying on O'Connell Bridge

goggling at the tulips of the evening

the green tulips

shining round the corner like an anthrax

shining on Guinness's barges

the overtone the face

too late to righten the sky

doch doch I assure thee

Alba

before morning you shall be here

and Dante and the Logos and all strata and mysteries

and the branded moon

beyond the white plane of music

that you shall establish here before morning

grave suave singing silk

stoop to the black firmament of areca

rain on the bamboos flowers of smoke alley of willows

who though you stoop with fingers of compassion

to endorse the dust

shall not add to your bounty

whose beauty shall be a sheet before me

a statement of itself drawn across the tempest of emblems

so that there is no sun and no unveiling

and no host

only I and then the sheet

and bulk dead

Dortmunder

Int the magic the Homer dusk

past the red spire of sanctuary

I null she royal hulk

hasten to the violet lamp to the thin K'in music of the bawd.

She stands before me in the bright stall

sustaining the jade splinters

the scarred signaculum of purity quiet

the eyes the eyes black till the plagal east

92

shall resolve the long night phrase.

Then, as a scroll, folded,

and the glory of her dissolution enlarged

in me, Habbakuk, mard of all sinners.

Schopenhauer is dead, the bawd

puts her lute away.

Sanies I

all the livelong way this day of sweet showers from Portrane on the seashore

Donabate sad swans of Turvey Swords

pounding along in three ratios like a sonata

like a Ritter with pommelled scrotum atra cura on the step

Botticelli from the fork down pestling the transmission

tires bleeding voiding zeep the highway

all heaven in the sphincter

the sphincter

müüüüüüüde now

potwalloping now through the promenaders

this trusty all-steel this super-real

bound for home like a good boy

where I was born with a pop with the green of the larches

ah to be back in the caul now with no trusts

no fingers no spoilt love

belting along in the meantime clutching the bike

the billows of the nubile the cere wrack

pot-valient caulless waisted in rags hatless

for mamma papa chicken and ham

warm Grave too say the word happy days snap the stem shed a tear

this day Spy Wednesday seven pentades past

oh the larches the pain drawn like a cork

the glans ho took the day off up hill and down dale

with a ponderous fawn from the Liverpool London and Globe

back the shadows lengthen the sycamores are sobbing

to roly-poly oh to me a spanking boy

buckets of fizz childbed is thirsty work

for the midwife he is gory

for the proud parent he washes down a gob of gladness

for footsore Achates also he pants his pleasure

sparkling beestings for me

tired now hair ebbing gums ebbing ebbing home

good as gold now in the prime after a brief prodigality

yea and suave

suave urbane beyond good and evil

biding my time without rancour you may take your oath

distraught half-crooked courting the sneers of these fauns these smart nymphs

clipped like a pederast as to one trouder-end

sucking in my bloated lantern behind a Wild Woodbine

93

cinched to death in a filthy slicker

flinging the proud Swift forward breasting the swell of Stürmers

I see main verb at last

her whom alone in the accusitive

I have dismounted to love

gliding towards me dauntless nautch-girl on the face of the waters

dauntless daughter of desires in the old black and flamingo

get along with you now take the six the seven the eight or the little single-decker

take a bus for all I care walk cadge a lift

home to the cob of your web in Holles Street

and let the tiger go on smiling

in our hearts that funds ways home

Sanies II

there was a happy land

the American Bar

in Rue Mouffetard

there were red eggs there

I have a dirty I say honorrhoids

coming from the bath

the steam the delight the sherbet

the chagrin of the old skinnymalinks

slouching happy body

loose in my stinking old suit

sailing slouching up to Puvis the gauntlet of tulips

lash lash me with yaller tulips I will let down

my stinking old trousers

my love she sewed up the pockets alive the live-oh she did she said that was better

spotless then within the brown rags gliding

frescoward free up the fjord of dyed eggs anf thongbells

I disappear don't you know into the local

the mackerel are at billiards there they are crying the scores

the Barfrau makes a big impression with her mighty bottom

Dante and blissful Beatrice are there

prior to Vita Nuova

the balls splash no luck comrade

Gracieuse is there Belle-Belle down the drain

booted Percinet with his cobalt jowl

they are necking gobble-gobble

suck is not suck that alters

lo Alighieri has got off au revoir to all that

I break down quite in a titter of despite

hark

upon the saloon a terrible hush

a shiver convulses Madame de la Motte

it courses it peals down her collops

the great bottom foams into stillness

quick quick the cavaletto supplejacks for mumbo-jumbo

vivas puellas mortui incurrrrrsant boves

oh subito subito ere she recover the cang bamboo for bastinado

94

a bitter moon fessade à la mode

oh Becky spare me I have done thee no wrong spare me damn thee

spare me good Becky

call off thine adders Becky I will compensate thee in full

Lord have mercy upon us

Christ have mercy upon us

Lord have mercy upon us

Serena I

without the grand old Britich Museum

Thales and the Aretino

on the Bosom of the Regents's Park the phlox

crackles under the thunder

scarlet beauty in our world dead fish adrift

all things full of gods

pressed down and bleeding

a weaver-bird is tangerine the harpy is past caring

the condor likewise in his mangy boa

they stare across monkey-hill the elephants

Ireland

the light creeps down their old home canyon

sucks me aloof to that old reliable

the burning btm of George the drill

ah across the way a adder

broaches her rat

white as snow

in her dazzling oven strom of peristalsis

limae labor

ah father father that art in heaven

I find me taking the Crystal Palace

for the Blessed Isles from Primrose Hill

alas I must be that kind of person

hence in Ken Wood who shall find me

my breath held in the midst of thickets

none but the most quarris lovers

I surprise me moved by the many a funnel hinged

for the obeisance to Tower Bridge

the viper's curtsy to and from the City

till in the dusk a lighter

blind with pride

tosses aside the scarf of the bascules

then in the grey hold of the ambulance

throbbing on the brink ebb of sighs

then I hug me below among the canaille

until a guttersnipe blast his cèrned eyes

95

demanding 'ave I done with the Mirror

I stump off in a fearful rage under Married Men's Quarters

Bloody Tower

and afar off at all speed screw me up Wren's giant bully

and curse the day caged panting on the platform

under the flaring urn

I was not born before Defoe

but in Ken Wood

who shall find me

my brother the fly

the common housefly

sidling out of darkness into light

fastens on his place in the sun

whets his siz legs

revels in his planes his poisers

it is the autumn of his life

he could not serve typhoid and mammon

Serena II

this clonic earth

see-saw she is blurred in sleep

she is fat half dead the rest is free-wheelinf

part the black shag the pelt

is ashen woad

snarl and howl in the wood wake all the birds

hound the harlots out of the ferns

this damfool twilight threshing in the brake

bleating to be bloodied

this crapulent hush

tear its heart out

in her dreams she trembles again

way back in the dark old days panting

in the claws of the Pins in the stress of her hour

the bag writhes she thinks she is dying

the light fails it is time to lie down

Clew Bay vat of xanthic flowers

Croagh Patrick waned Hindu to spite a pilgrim

she is ready she has laid down above all the islands of glory

straining now this Sabbath evening of garlands

with a yo-heave-ho of able-bodied swans

out from the doomed land their reefs of tresses

in a hag she drops her young

the wales in Blacksod Bay are dancing

the asphodels come running the flags after

she thinks she is dying she is ashamed

she took me up on to a watershed

96

whence like the rubrics of a childhood

behold Meath shining through a chink in the hills

posses of larches there is no going back on

a rout of tracks and streams fleeing to the sea

kindergartens of steeples and then the harbour

like a woman making to cover her breasts

and left me

with whatever trust of panic we went out

with so much shall we return

there shall be no loss of panic between a man and his dog

bitch though he be

sodden pair of Churchman

muzzling the cairn

it is worse than dream

the light randy slut can't be easy

this clonic earth

all these phantoms shuddering out of focus

it is useless to close the eyes

all the chords of the earth bloken like a woman pianist's

the toads abroad again on their rounds

sidling up to their snares

the fairy-tales of Meath ended

so say your prayers now and go to bed

your prayers before the lamps start to sing behind the larches

here at these knees of stone

then to bye-bye on the bones

Serena III

fix this pothook of beauty on this palette

you never know it might be final

or leave her she is paradise and then

plush hymens on your eyeballs

or on Butt Bridge blush for shame

the mixed declension of those mammae

cock up thy moon thine and thine only

up up up to the scar of evening

swoon upon the little purple

house of prayer

something heart of Mary

the Bull and Pool Beg that will never meet

not in this world

whereas dart away through the cavoerting scapes

bucket o'er Victoria Bridge that's the idea

97

slow down slink down the Rindsend Road

Irishtown Sandymount puzzle find the Hell Fire

the Merrion Flats scored with a thrillion sigmas

Jesus Christ Son of God Savior His Finger

girls taken strippin that's the idea

on the Bootersgrad breakwind and water

the tide making the dun gulls in a panic

the sands quicken in your hot heart

hide yourself not in the Rock keep on the move

keep on the move

Malacoda

thrice he cam

the undertaker's man

impassable behind his scrutal bowler

to measure

is he not paid to measure

this incorruptible in the vestibule

this malebranca knee deep in the lilies

Malacoda knee-deep in the lilies

Malacoda for all the expert awe

that felts his perineum mutes his signal

sighing up through the heavy air

must it be it must be it must be

find the weeds engage them in the garden

hear she may see she need not

to coffin

with assistant ungulata

find the weeds engage their attention

hear she must see she need not

to cover

to be sure cover cover all over

your targe allow me hold your sulphur

divine dogday glass set fair

stay Scarmilion stay stay

lay this Huysum on the box

mind the imago it is he

hear she must see she must

all aboard all souls

half-mast aye aye

nay

Da Tagte Es

redeem the surrogate goodbyes

the sheet astream in your hand

98

who have no more for the land

and the glass unmisted above your eyes

Echo's Bones

Asylum under my tread all this day

their muffled revels as the flesh falls

breaking without fear or favor wind

the gantelope of sense and nonsense run

taken by the maggots for what they are

Quatre Poemes Author’s Translation

Dieppe again the last ebb

the dead shingle

the turning then the steps

toward the lighted town

2.

my way is in the sand

flowing between the shingle and the dune

the summer rain rains on my life, on me

my life harrying fleeing

to its beginning to this end

my peace is there in the receding mist

when I may cease

from treading these long shifting thresholds

and live the space of a door

that opens and shuts

3.

what would I do without this world faceless incurious

where to be lasts but an instant

where every instant spills in the void

the ignorance of having been without

this wave where in the end

body and shadow together are engulfed

what would I do without this silence where the murmurs die

the paintings the frenzies toward succour towards love

without this sky that soars

above it's ballast dust

what would I do what I did yesterday and the day before

peering out of my deadlight looking for another

wandering like me eddying far from all the living

in a convulsive space

among the voices voiceless

that throng my hiddenness

99

4.

I would like my love to die

and the rain to be falling on the graveyard

and on me walking the streets

mourning the first and last to love me

First French Collection

I.

they come

others and same

with each it is other and it is same

with each the absence of love is the same

with each the absence of life is the same.

II.

To her the calm act

the clever pores the affable sex

the waiting not so slow the regrets not so long absence

in the service of the presence

few fragments of blue in the head the spots

finally dead of heart

all the late grace of a rain ceasing

to fall on an August night

with her empty him pure of love

III.

to be there jawless toothless

where the pleasure of loss is lost

together with the scarcely inferior

one of gain

and Roscelin and we wait

adverb oh little gift

empty empty otherwise the wrecks of the song

my father gave me to a husband

or playing with fingers

let her moisten

as long as she likes till the elegy

of shod horses' hooves still far from Les Halles

or the riff-raff's water crumbles in the pipes

or nothing more

let her moisten

perfect the excess

and come

with her idiot mouth with her hand formicating

100

the hollow bulk the hollow eye listening

to far-off tinkling scissor snips.

IV. Ascension

across the thin bulkhead

the day when a child

prodigal in his own way

will return to his family

i hear the voice

it is emotional it comments

on the cup of world of football

always too young

at the same time by the open window

by the songs the whole court

the swell of the faithful

their blood will spur out with abundance

on the drapes on the sweet peas on their guy

with his filthy fingers he closed the lids

on her green eyes wide with surprise

she delicately rides

my tomb of air

V. the fly

between the scene and me

the window

empty except her

hell for leather

girt in its black guts

antennae frantic wings tied down

legs hooked mouth sucking emptiness

slating the blue crashing into the invisible

under my powerless thumb it capstizes

the sea and the serene sky

VI.

music of indifference

heart time air fire sand

of silence atrophy of loves

cover their voice so

that I may hear no more

me silent

101

VII.

lonely wood

grub burns adulterer bursts alone like before

the absent ones are dead those still here stink

pluck out your eyes divert them on reeds

tease they or the aïs

not the punishment there is the wind

and wastefulness

VIII.

so have we good

not the good time and not the bad

shut up at home shut up by themselves

as if it was of yesterday remembering the mammoth

the dinotherium the first kisses

the ice ages not bringing any thing new

the great heat of the thirteenth of their era

on smoking Lisbon Kant coldly leaning

dreaming in generations of oaks and forgetting his father

his eyes if he had the moustache

if he was good of what he is dead

we are of it less eaten without appetite

not the bas time and not the worst

shut up at home shut up by themselves

IX. Dieppe

[This poem is translated by the author and included in Quatre Poemes]

X. Rue de Vangiard

at mid-height

I stop and gaping of guilelessness

exposes the plate to light and shade

then fortified meals

of one unimpeachable negative

XI.Lutèce Square From where we are seated higher than the tiers

I see us enter from the Rue des Arènes side,

halt, look up, then ponderously

come towards us across the dark sand,

more and more ugly, ugly like the others,

but silent. a little green dog

comes in a rush close to Rue Monge,

102

she stops, she watches it

it crosses the arena, disappeared

behind the plinth of knowing Gabriel de Mortillet.

She returns, I have left, I climb alone

the rustic steps, I touch with my left hand

the rustic banister, it is of concrete. She hesitates,

takes an step to the way out of Rue Monge, then I follow.

I shiver, it is I rejoining me,

it is with other eyes that I now see

the sand, the puddles underneath the drizzle,

a little girl dragging her hoop behind her,

a couple, lovers who knows, hand in hand,

the empty tiers, the lofty houses, and the sky

that lights us up too late.

I return to myself, I am surprised

to find her sad face there.

XII.

even in the cavern sky and earth

and one by one the ancient voices

from beyond the grave

and slowly the same light

which on the pains on Enna in long rape

steeped recently the capillaries

and the same laws

as not so long ago

adorable of uncertain void

still the mouth of hell.

Second French Collection

I

all right all right it is a country

where the oversight where weighs the oversight

gently on the unnamed world

there the head we say nothing of it the head is silent

and we know none we know nothing at all

the singing of the dead mouths dies

on the shore he traveled

there is nothing in crying

my solitude I know go I know it badly

I have time that is what I tell myself I have time

but what time starving bone the time of dog

of pale sky non- stop my grain of sky

103

of ray which climbs trembling eye

of microns of the years of darkness

you would want me coming from A to B I cannot

I cannot exit I am in a trackless country

yes yes it is a beautiful thing you have there a

good beautiful thing

what is it that does not ask me more questions

spiral dust of instants what is it that is the same

calmness love hatred calmness calmness

II. Death of A.D.

and there being there

thrust up against my old plank pock-marked with the black

of blindly mixed up days and nights

in being there in fleeing not and fleeing being there

bent towards the confession of expiring time

with having been what he was doing what he did

with me with my friend dead yesterday the shiny eye

the long teeth panting in his devouring beard

the life of saints a life on day of life

reviving at night their black sins

dead yesterday while I lived

and being there drinking down above the storm

the unpardonable crime of time

gripping old wood the witness of departures

witness of returns

III.

live dead my lonely season

read blank chrysanthemum

lively nests abandoned

mud of the leaves of April

beautiful days grey of frost

[Poems IV, V, and VI are translated by the author and included in Quatre Poemes]

Two Poems

Cascando 1.

why not merely

the despaired of occasion of wordshed

is it not better abort than be barren

the hours after you are gone are so leaden

they will always start dragging too soon

the grapples clawing blindly the bed of want

bringing up the bones

104

the old loves

sockets filled once with eyes like yours

all always is it better too soon than never

the black want splashing their faces

saying again nine days never floated the loved

nor nine months

nor nine lives

2.

saying again

if you do not teach me I shall not learn

saying again there is a last

even of last times

last times of begging

last times of loving

of knowing not knowing pretending

a last even of last times of saying

if you do not love me I shall not be loved

if I do not love you I shall not love

the churn of stale words in the heart again

love love love thud of the old plunger

pestling the unalterable

whey of words

terrified again

of not loving

of loving and not you

of being loved and not by you

of knowing not knowing pretending

pretending

I and all the others that will love you

if they love you

3.

unless they love you

Saint-Lô

Vire will wind in other shadows

unborn through the bright ways tremble

and the old mind ghost-forsaken

sink into its havoc

Late Poems

Thither

Thither

A far cry

For one

So little

105

Fair daffodils

March then

Then there

Then there

Then thence

Daffodils

Again

March then

Again

A far cry

Again

For one

So little

Dread Nay

Head fast

In out as dead

Till rending

Long still

Faint stir

Unseal the eye

Till still again

Seal again

Head sphere

Ashen smooth

One eye

No hint when to

Then glare

Cyclop no

One side

Eerily

One face

Of out spread

Vast in

The highmost

Snow white

Sheeting all

Asylum head

Sole blot

Faster than where

In hellice eyes

Stream till

Frozen to

Jaws rail

106

Gnaw gnash

Teeth with stork

Clack chatter

Come through

No sense and gone

While eye

Shocked wide

With white

Still to bare

Stir dread

Nay to nought

Sudden in

Ashen smooth

Aghast

Glittering rent

Till sudden

Smooth again

Stir so past

Never been

At ray

In latibule

Long dark

Stir of dread

Till breach

Long sealed

Dark again

Still again

So ere

Long still

Long nought

Rent so

So stir

Long past

Head fast

In out as dead

Something there

Something there

Where

Out there

Out where

Outside

What

The head what else

Something there somewhere outside

107

At the faint sound so brief

It is gone and the whole globe

Not yet bare

The eye

Opens wide

Wide

Till in the end

Nothing more

Shutters it again

So the odd time

Out there

Somewhere out there

Like as if

As if

Something

Not life

Necessarily

Roundelay

on all that strand

at end of day

steps sole sound

long sole sound

until unbidden stay

then no sound

on all that strand

long no sound

until unbidden go

steps sole sound

long sole sound

on all that strand

at end of day

NEITHER

to and fro in shadow from inner to outer shadow

from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself

by way of neither

as between two lit refuges whose doors once

neared gently close, once away turned from

gently part again

beckoned back and forth and turned away

heedless of the way, intent on the one gleam

or the other

unheard footfalls only sound

till at last halt for good, absent for good

from self and other

108

then no sound

then gently light unfading on that unheeded

neither

unspeakable home

WHAT IS THE WORD

for Joe Chaikin

folly -

folly for to -

for to -

what is the word -

folly from this -

all this -

folly from all this -

given -

folly given all this -

seeing -

folly seeing all this -

this -

what is the word -

this this -

this this here -

all this this here -

folly given all this -

seeing -

folly seeing all this this here -

for to -

what is the word -

see -

glimpse -

seem to glimpse -

need to seem to glimpse -

folly for to need to seem to glimpse -

what -

what is the word -

and where -

folly for to need to seem to glimpse what where -

where -

what is the word -

there -

over there -

away over there -

afar -

afar away over there -

afaint -

afaint afar away over there what -

what -

what is the word -

109

seeing all this -

all this this -

all this this here -

folly for to see what -

glimpse -

seem to glimpse -

need to seem to glimpse -

afaint afar away over there what -

folly for to need to seem to glimpse afaint afar away over there what -

what -

what is the word -

what is the word

110

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113

Index

“Beckett industry” ........................................ 8, 9

“Death of A.D.” ..................................... 19, 103

“Repetition Compulsion” ............................... 18

“Three Dialogue" ......................................... 110

A Sonnet Taken from Dream of Fair to

Middling Women ........................................ 82

Acts of Literature ......................................... 110

Alba .............................................. 39, 40, 68, 91

Allegory of wall ......................................... 7, 24

Althusser, Louis ..................................... 28, 111

Anti-foundationalism ....................................... 8

Aporia............................................................. 13

Aporias ................................................... 69, 111

Aristotle .................................................... 33, 78

Ascension ......................................... 23, 66, 100

Attridge, Derek......... 4, 7, 9, 17, 23, 45, 75, 110

Badiou, Alan .................................................... 9

Banham, Gary .............................................. 110

Begam, Richard ................................................ 9

Benjamin, Walter ......................................... 110

Binary oppositions ......................................... 14

Blanchot, M ......................................... 9, 28,110

Calvary by Night ...................................... 70, 79

Carrigan, Cky J ............................. 7, 14, 15, 110

Cascando .................. 19, 21, 22, 37, 49, 55, 103

Casket of Pralinen for a Daughter of a

Dissipated Mandarin ............................ 45, 80

Che Cos’è La Poesia .................................... 110

Christ ................................ 19, 77, 80, 81, 94, 97

Cinders. .................................................. 21, 111

Coughlan< Patricia ........................... 39, 40, 110

Craig, Edward .......................................... 7, 110

Da Tagte Es .............................................. 70, 97

Davies< Paul .................................... 40, 41, 110

Davis, Coulin ....................... 10, 27, 28, 29, 110

Death of A. D ............................................... 103

Delogocentric ................................................... 8

Descartes, Rene ................ 18, 19, 32, 46, 78, 79

Dieppe ........................................ 21, 22, 98, 101

Différance 10, 12, 13, 14, 16, 18, 23, 33, 38, 69,

74, 110

Disjecta ...................................... 10, 45, 59, 110

Dissemination......................................... 64, 111

Dortmunder .................................................... 91

Dread Nay .............................................. 50, 105

Dream of Fair to Middling Women ............. 110

Drew, Elizabeth.............. 47, 56, 57, 58, 68, 111

Duthuit, George............................................ 110

Eaglestone, Robert ........................................... 9

Echo's Bones .................... 25, 29, 55, 64, 88, 98

Eliot, T.S. ....................................................... 30

Endgame ........................................ 6, 35, 64, 72

Enueg ............................... 31, 55, 65, 69, 88, 90

Equivocal ....................................... 4, 42, 63, 69

Erasure ........................................................... 14

Ergon........................................................ 37, 49

fin-de-siècle .................................................... 30

First French Collection.................................. 99

First Love ....................................................... 21

Fletcher, John ......................................... 61, 111

Guattari, Flix .................................................... 9

FOR FUTURE REFERENCE ....................... 84

Foucault, Michel .............................................. 9

FROM THE ONLY POET TO A SHINING

WHORE ..................................................... 86

Bataille , Georges ............................................. 9

Deleuze , Gilles ................................................ 9

Given Time ................................. 18, 19, 43, 110

Gnome ............................................................ 79

God ..... 41, 42, 53, 54, 59, 79, 80, 81, 85, 87, 97

Habermas ......................................................... 9

Happy Days ...................................................... 6

Harvey, Lawrence ... 8, 9, 23, 25, 43, 46, 54, 66,

68, 69, 71, 75, 77, 79, 111

Heidegger ......................................... 7, 9, 15, 52

HELL CRANE TO STARLING .................... 86

HOME OLGA ................................................ 84

How to Avoid Speaking .................... 46, 52, 111

Hymen ...................................................... 15, 18

Invagination ................................................... 16

Iser, Wolfgang.................................................. 9

Iterability ............................................ 15, 46, 47

Jettisoned Poems ...................................... 70, 79

Joyce,James .................................... 5, 19, 30, 32

Kant, Imanuel ................................... 15, 36, 101

Kristeva, Julia .................................................. 9

114

Lethargy ................................................... 23, 24

Letter to A Japanese Friend ......................... 110

Lèvi-Strauss ................................................... 14

Little, Roger ................................................. 111

Logocentrism ................................................. 15

Lutèce Square ......................................... 33, 101

Macrocosm . 4, 33, 36, 54, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 74

Mahon, Derek............................................... 111

Malacoda ............................................ 25, 32, 97

Mallarmé ........................................................ 64

Malone Dies ..................................................... 6

Martin, Jennifer .................. 8, 15, 110, 111, 112

Merleau-Ponty .................................................. 9

Metaphysics ................... 7, 8, 13, 14, 16, 19, 75

Microcosm . 4, 22, 32, 36, 47, 54, 64, 66, 67, 68,

74

Molloy .............................................................. 6

Murphy ............................................................. 5

Mythopoetics .................................................. 10

NEITHER..................................................... 107

Nietzsche .......................................................... 9

Nihilism ............................................................ 7

Nojoumian, Amir Ali .. 4, 32, 52, 53, 59, 60, 61,

111

Noumena ........................................................ 15

Oofish ............................................................. 79

Originary lack ................................................ 16

Paralysis ......................................................... 18

Parargon .................................................. 37, 49

Phaedo ........................................................... 16

Phaedrus ........................................................ 16

Phallogocentrism ............................................ 16

Pharmakon ............................................... 16, 18

Phenomena ......................................... 14, 15, 65

Pilling, John .. 22, 25, 27, 30, 31, 54, 65, 66, 67,

68, 111, 112

Plato ......................................................... 15, 16

Positions ....................................................... 110

Post Card ......................................... 18, 50, 111

Pound, Ezra .................................................... 30

Proust ............................................. 5, 18, 27, 65

Quatre Poemes . 21, 38, 41, 60, 65, 98, 101, 103

RETURN TO THE VERSITY ....................... 87

Rhetoric .................. 7, 11, 13, 21, 48, 49, 51, 55

Robbe-Grillet, Alain............................... 35, 112

Roundelay .................... 47, 56, 57, 58, 107, 111

Royle, Nicholas ...................................... 10, 112

Rue de Vangiard .......................................... 101

Saint-Lô........................................................ 104

Sanies ....................................................... 92, 93

Seaver, Richard. W ...................................... 112

Second French Collection ...................... 23, 102

Selden, Raman ............................................. 112

Self-Deconstructive........................................ 17

Serena I .......................................................... 94

Serena II ................................................... 55, 95

Serena III .................................................. 55, 96

Shaw, Philip ........................................... 37, 112

Signifieds ....................................... 4, 38, 64, 70

Signifier........................................ 38, 59, 70, 71

Sim, Stuart.................................. 14, 15, 16, 112

Sokhanvar Jalal ................................................ 4

Spurs. ........................................................... 111

Stewart, Paul .......................................... 52, 112

Stocker, Barry ........................................ 10, 112

Stoekl, Allan .......................................... 28, 110

Supplement ............................................ 16, 111

The Ear of the Other .................. 50, 59, 61, 111

the fly ............................................... 22, 95, 100

The Gift of Death ......................................... 111

The Unnamable .............. 6 ,32, 52, 53, 110, 111

The Vulture .................................................... 88

The Work of Mourning ................................. 111

Theodore W. Adorno ....................................... 9

Thither .............................................. 20, 47, 104

Threshold 10, 11, 17, 21, 23, 24, 33, 36, 37, 42,

49, 50, 51, 54, 56, 64, 65, 66, 68, 70, 74

Trace .............................................................. 16

Tyson, Lois ...................................... 12, 13, 112

Unchangeablity .............................................. 28

Undecidability ... 4, 7, 11, 12, 13, 17, 18, 26, 34,

35, 38, 40, 41, 44, 48, 50, 56, 64, 67, 70, 71,

74

Untranslatability ............................................. 60

Waiting for Godot ............................................ 6

Walther von der Vogelweide ......................... 25

Watt. ................................................................. 5

WHAT IS THE WORD ............................... 108

Whoroscope ..................... 18, 19, 32, 43, 46, 76

Writing and difference ................................. 111

115

Yale School of deconstruction ......................... 7

YOKE OF LIBERTY............................... 30, 88

Zende Budi, Mehran .............................. 59, 112