BECKETTS ENDLESSNESS:

Rewriting Modernity and the Postmodern Sublime

Russell Smith
This article considers the pervasiveness of the theme of ending both in
Becketts work and in Beckett criticism. Accepting the view that Beck-
etts experiments with narrative undermine the possibility of closure,
the article examines the nature of Beckettian temporality, its sense of
finality without end, in relation to the temporality of postmodern-
ism as discussed by Fredric Jameson and Frank Kermode. Drawing
on the work of Jean-Franois Lyotard, the article seeks to understand
Beckettian temporality as neither a continuation of, nor a rupture
with, the time of modernity, but a rewriting akin to Freuds inter-
minable analysis.
The end is in the beginning and yet you go on (Beckett 1958a, 44).
Hamms words in Endgame define as well as any others the nature of
temporality in Becketts works: simultaneously a longing to end and
an imperative to go on. As The Unnamables narrator says, The
search for the means to put an end to things, an end to speech, is what
enables the discourse to continue (Beckett 1958b, 15).
Although a whole series of Becketts works, from The Unnam-
able through to Stirrings Still, set themselves the task of making an
ending, it is widely accepted that ends, however desired, are never
attained in Becketts fiction, and indeed that Becketts experiments
with narrative form explicitly undermine the possibility of coming to
an end. By ending repeatedly, they fail to end definitively.
If Beckettian temporality is, in Morans fine phrase, finality
without end (Beckett 1955, 152), what can it mean to come after
Beckett, as criticism surely must do, since Beckett never comes to an
end? How can we conceive of Becketts work in a way that neither
condemns this endlessness as a denial of history, nor celebrates it in
an incantation that signals a foreclosure of criticism?
406
This article consists of two main parts. The first part, in three
sections, reviews the ways in which Becketts works subvert the no-
tion of an ending, examines the rhetoric of ending in Beckett criticism,
and then considers Fredric Jamesons condemnation of postmodern
(and in passing, Beckettian) temporality as a kind of paralysis of his-
torical development. The second part, also in three sections, considers
Becketts narratives in the light of Frank Kermodes classic study The
Sense of an Ending, and then turns to the work of Jean-Franois Lyo-
tard for two notions useful for re-thinking the relation between Beck-
ettian time and postmodernity: the concepts of rewriting modernity
and the postmodern sublime.
Part 1
Becketts narratives evade closure in various ways, both in the char-
acteristic structures of their non-endings, and in the ways the texts
as a whole continually displace narrative sequence or development. At
the same time, however, Becketts narratives continually wrestle with
teleological tropes, with forms of narrative that would seem to provide
what H. Porter Abbott calls an arrow of meaning (Abbott, 110).
Among Becketts characteristic non-endings, a first example
might be those texts that end with a repetition suggesting circularity,
such as Waiting for Godot, most famously, but also, in a more extreme
form, Play, which consists of the same text performed twice, sug-
gesting an endless, hellish repetition.
A second form is the ending presented as an arbitrary cut in a
continuous and apparently endless stream of speech, such as the ter-
minal Ill go on of The Unnamable, or, in Not I, the fade-out on the
words pick it up, signifying a resumption of the flow of speech
(Beckett 1985a, 223).
A third form is the text which breaks off suddenly, as if the jag-
ged edge of an incomplete fragment, most notable in the texts Beckett
published as fragments: the Texts for Nothing, the Fizzles, and From
an Abandoned Work.
A fourth form is the text which ends with a supplement, such as
Watts famous addenda of precious and illuminating material
(Beckett 1953, 247). The addenda destabilise the novels ending with
what Derrida calls the strange structure of the supplement (Derrida,
23), undermining any unity and completeness the novel might have
claimed.
407
A fifth form of non-ending relates to the characteristic texts of
Becketts later period, most notably the second trilogy of Company,
Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho. These texts enact a verbal crea-
tion and decreation of imagined worlds, in which, in Abbotts words,
the voice packs up its construction (Abbott, 115) at the end. Begin-
ning with nothing Say a body. Where none (Beckett 1983, 7) the
text constructs a world, perhaps even a narrative, only then to disman-
tle it, ending with the void with which it began. The gesture of erasure
nevertheless leaves the cancelled contents faintly legible, as an un-
lessenable least (Beckett 1983, 36).
Among Becketts strategies of narrative displacement, the most
pervasive relates to the re-ordering of narrative sequence, in terms of
both the sequence of events and the sequence of their narration (the
relation between histoire and rcit in the terms used by Grard
Genette). Thus Sam, the putative narrator of Watt, informs us at the
beginning of Part IV that Watt told the beginning of his story, not
first, but second and told the end of his story not fourth, but third
(Beckett 1953, 215). This might lead us to assume that the real
ending of the novel is the conclusion of Part III. But to complicate
matters further, Sam informs us that Watt was in the habit of making
inversions in the order of his speech of letters in the word, of words
in the sentence, of sentences in the period leaving the real ending
of Watts narrative completely indeterminable (Beckett 1953, 164-
168).
Another more subtle means by which Beckett undermines the
sense of an ending is the way in which, as Andrew Gibson notes, the
completed work flaunts its own paradoxically untidy incompleteness
(Gibson, 145). Bruno Clment calls this Becketts rhetoric of ill-
saying (Clment, 1994), arguing that the plethoric signs of narratorial
incompetence in Becketts fictions mistakes, corrections, hesitations,
retractions, changes of plan and abandoned searches for le mot juste
combine to give the impression of the text as an unfinished draft, in
which the ending, like the rest of the text, is provisional rather than
definitive, an end faute de mieux (Clment 1996, 123).
But perhaps the most characteristically Beckettian means by
which Beckett destabilises ending is in the way his texts are perme-
ated from start to finish by a rhetoric of ending. Thus Endgame be-
gins: Finished, its finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly fin-
ished (Beckettt 1958a, 12). Endings, or putative endings, ceaselessly
408
interrupt the course of Becketts narratives with their falsely dying
cadences. In such texts, which become, in a sense, all ending, the con-
clusiveness of the final words is radically undermined: a definitive
end cannot be reached precisely because ends are so continually re-
hearsed and unsuccessfully invoked.
The two forms of teleology that characterise Becketts narra-
tives are also widely familiar: the individual theme of the quest or
journey, and the cosmic theme of entropic decay, the sense of some-
thing [] taking its course (Beckett 1958a, 17). Sometimes these
themes are deployed in parallel, most notably in the trilogy, where
Molloy presses on in search of his mother, and Moran in search of
Molloy, in the face of advancing physical decrepitude; where both
Malone and the voice of The Unnamable pursue their ill-defined goals
in a world that is inexorably disintegrating.
It is possible to see in Becketts later works a progressive un-
dermining of these teleologies (although this itself is a teleological
reading). The theme of the quest becomes simply the theme of walk-
ing, without goal, prompted by an inscrutable restlessness: the narrator
of From an Abandoned Work says I have never in my life been on
my way anywhere, but simply on my way (Beckett 1995, 155-56).
So too, the theme of an embodied narrators entropic decay is replaced
by a disembodied narration which constructs and dismantles its
imaginary worlds, seemingly not subject to the vicissitudes of the
body, or even the laws of the physical universe (the light and heat
without source in the cylinder pieces, for instance).
Arguing that Texts for Nothing, with their wilful shredding of
narrative linearity, represent a turning point in Becketts fiction, H.
Porter Abbott suggests that the inspiring genre of the Texts is not the
quest but the broad non-narrative category of the meditative personal
essay (Abbott, 107). If narrative is teleological, and requires an end-
ing, the essay is inherently speculative, provisional, open-ended:
Becketts fictions, and their bristling impatience with the conventions
of narrative, can be read, not just as narratives, but as critical essays
on narrative itself.
*****
409
If Becketts narratives subvert the notion of ending, there are many
ways in which critical discourse nevertheless constructs Becketts
work as enacting endings.
Firstly, Becketts work is often seen as bringing an end to mod-
ernism or modernity. Anthony Cronins biography calls Beckett The
Last Modernist, and Richard Begam argues that Becketts five novels
from Murphy to The Unnamable provide the earliest and most influ-
ential literary expression we have of the end of modernity (Begam,
3).
Secondly, and as a corollary, Becketts work is also read in
terms of the end of humanism, as contributing towards the Death of
Man, when, as Michel Foucault writes in The Order of Things, man
would be erased like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea
(Foucault 1973, 387). To cite just one example of this reading, Gab-
riele Schwab describes Becketts work as a philosophical literature
that explores the condition of the posthuman (Schwab, 58), with the
cylinder of The Lost Ones enacting the end of the human as we know
it (Schwab, 60).
Thirdly, another important theme of the end of humanism is
the death of the author and the liberation of pure textuality, a project
which Becketts writing is seen to enact in exemplary fashion. This is
evident most notably in Michel Foucaults use of the line What
matter whos speaking, someone said what matter whos speaking
(Beckett 1995, 109) as the epigraph to the enormously influential
essay What is an Author? (Foucault 1977, 113).
A fourth influential reading sees Becketts work as enacting the
end of narrative as such, or rather, of the kinds of narratives in which
endings are possible. Thus Richard Begam writes of Malone Dies:
Every time the novel takes two steps forward, it takes one step back,
and while it doggedly pursues its particular ends, it never decisively
achieves them, since one of the things it wants to end is precisely the
idea of ends (Begam, 125-126).
No doubt there are other ends with which Becketts work has
been associated. However, all the readings outlined above may be
broadly classified as poststructuralist, and consist in reading Beckett
as a poststructuralist avant la lettre, an uncanny precursor of Barthes,
Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze. While the poststructuralist re-reading
of Beckett has uncovered deep affinities between Beckett and post-
structuralism, what I wish to explore further is the mode of temporal-
410
ity which governs these readings, and in particular, their use of a par-
ticular rhetorical locution: the end of, followed by a more or less
weighty substantive modernity, humanism, the author, nar-
rative.
One of the primary aims of poststructuralist criticism is pre-
cisely to question the logic of binaries that underpins the historical
dialectic and the theme of revolution, which would posit epochal
shifts such as the end of modernity as necessary stages in an un-
folding teleology. Thus, for instance, Richard Begam is careful not to
suggest that Becketts work is a definitive overcoming of modern-
ism, and in particular of the figures of Joyce and Proust:
Beckett uses these writers [] as points of reference in his
own evolving dialogue with the modernism he seeks to
overcome. But that overcoming does not occur at least not
in any ultimate sense for the pentalogy ends, in effect, by
not ending (I cant go on, I must go on).
(Begam, 7)
Despite Begams precautions, however, it is notoriously difficult to
avoid teleological language in making claims for Beckett as an un-
canny precursor of poststructuralism. Thus Begam writes in his Af-
terword:
In taking up these Beckettian pretexts and contexts, in de-
veloping them in his own uniquely philosophical and literary
idiom, Derrida carries forward the postmodern project that
Beckett first articulated at the end of World War II.
(Begam, 186)
This notion of a project being carried forward attributes, I think, a
kind of instrumental teleology to Becketts work that is really not
justified within the terms the work sets itself. By contrast, Anthony
Uhlmanns study Beckett and Poststructuralism is careful to situate
Beckett, not as a precursor of poststructuralism, but as a contempo-
rary, a writer whose intellectual preoccupations arise from historical
conditions shared by the French theorists who came to prominence in
the 1960s.
411
Nevertheless, the rhetoric of ending continues to permeate
poststructuralist readings of Beckett. This is the paradoxical tempo-
rality of poststructuralism, littered with end of formulae, but
deeply suspicious of the rhetoric of overcoming characteristic of
modernism.
In the opening to one of the most influential theories of postmodern-
ism, Fredric Jameson claims:
The last few years have been marked by an inverted mille-
narianism in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic
or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of
this or that (the end of ideology, art, or social class; the cri-
sis of Leninism, social democracy, or the welfare state, etc.,
etc.); taken together, all of these perhaps constitute what is
increasingly called postmodernism.
(Jameson, 1)
Although Jameson sees postmodernism as a distinct historical epoch,
characterised in part by its anti-modernism, he doesnt see this sense
of an ending as a positive revolutionary moment of rupture with
the past, but as a crisis in historicity (Jameson, 25) where teleology
has failed, where the historical sense has ground to a standstill. So too,
Gianni Vattimo writes that postmodernism can be read,
not only as something new in relation to the modern, but
also as a dissolution of the category of the new in other
words, as an experience of the end of history rather than
as the appearance of a different stage of history itself.
(Vattimo, 4)
Postmodernity thus has an ambiguous relation to modernity: being a
product of modernity, postmodernity succeeds modernity and thus
continues modernitys project of exceeding itself. But as an anti-
modernity, postmodernity rejects modernitys supreme values of in-
novation, the historical dialectic and the teleology of the avant-garde.
Whereas in modernism the sense of an ending was simultaneously
replete with the promise of historical recommencement, in postmod-
ernism, the sense of an ending unending is symptomatic of histori-
412
cal paralysis: repetition, stasis, marking time. As I will argue in the
second part of this essay, there may be more productive ways of
thinking about postmodern temporality than the end of history
model outlined here. First, however, I want to look further at modern
and postmodern temporality through an examination of Becketts
reading of Proust.
Part 2
A key text for understanding Becketts approach to time, narrative,
and the question of endings is his essay on Proust. It is sometimes
underestimated how Becketts early essays on Proust and Joyce en-
abled him to formulate his own differences from them, even while
paying credit to their achievements in dismantling the conventions of
nineteenth-century realism.
The key concept in Becketts reading of Proust is the notion
of Habit, the selfs defence mechanism against the suffering caused by
genuine perception: Habit is the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the
lightning-conductor of existence (Beckett 1965, 19). Beckett opposes
two terms boredom and suffering: the boredom caused by Habits
smothering of perception, and the suffering caused by experiences that
pierce this defensive shield, when for a moment the boredom of liv-
ing is replaced by the suffering of being (Beckett 1965, 19).
If Habit is able to adjust to circumstances, the incursions
caused by the famous Proustian involuntary memory offer painfully
pleasurable glimpses of a reality which the boredom of living habitu-
ally obscures: in its flame it has consumed Habit and all its works,
and in its brightness revealed what the mock reality of experience
never can and never will reveal the real (Beckett 1965, 33). This
awakened perception is explicitly defined by Beckett in terms remi-
niscent of Kants aesthetics of the beautiful: The suffering of being:
that is, the free play of every faculty (Beckett 1965, 20).
Beckett distinguishes Prousts inspired perception (Beckett
1965, 84) from that of the classical artist who raises himself artifi-
cially out of Time in order to give relief to his chronology and causal-
ity to his development (Beckett 1965, 81). However, as Beckett is
well aware, the revelations of Time Regained do, in fact, raise the
narrator artificially out of Time: Prousts mystical experience
communicates an extratemporal essence (Beckett 1965, 75), recasting
the vast expanse of time elapsed in the Recherche in the retrospective
413
glow of boredom and suffering redeemed by the power of art. The
Proustian solution consists [] in the negation of Time and Death, the
negation of Death because the negation of Time. Death is dead be-
cause Time is dead. [] Time is not recovered, it is obliterated
(Beckett 1965, 75).
There is a useful discussion of the nature of narrative time in
Frank Kermodes The Sense of an Ending. Kermode distinguishes
between two conceptions of time: chronos, which he defines as clock
time, passing time, waiting time, one damn thing after another
(Kermode, 47); and kairos, defined as a point in time charged with
significance, charged with a meaning derived from its relation to the
end(Kermode, 47). Kairos is our way of bundling together percep-
tion of the present, memory of the past, and expectation of the future,
in a common organisation (Kermode, 46). The importance of kairos
is, of course, a cornerstone of modernist aesthetics, which valued
Bergsonian dure, the vivid, qualitative, subjective experience of lived
time, over quantitative, objective, drearily rationalist clock time.
Prousts involuntary memories, like Joyces epiphanies or Woolfs
moments of being, are the realm of kairos.
But if the modernists sought to discover outcrops of meaning
and value in the dull grey sea of passing time, Becketts strategy is
just the opposite: instead of transcending chronos by striving to pres-
ent an elusive kairos, Beckett strips away the consolations of kairos to
make us perceive the chronos underneath, the passing of time in all its
painful, meaningless dullness. Time in Beckett is not an extratemporal
arrangement of significant spots of time, but a relentless sequence of
ordinary moments, in which any supposedly transcendent moment of
ending, revelation, summation or closure is immediately replaced by
another moment in which it is questioned, undermined, cancelled or
forgotten:
Its the end that is the worst, no its the beginning that is the
worst, then the middle, then the end, in the end its the end
that is the worst, this voice that, I dont know, its every sec-
ond that is the worst, its a chronicle, the seconds pass, one
after another, jerkily, no flow, they dont pass, they arrive,
bang, bang, they bang into you, bounce off, fall and never
move again, when you have nothing left to talk about you
talk of time, seconds of time, there are some people add
414
them together to make a life, I cant, each one is the first, no
the second, or the third
(Beckett 1958b, 151-52)
This is a temporality in which, in the words of Jorge Luis Borges
essay A New Refutation of Time, each moment we live exists, not
the imaginary combination of these moments (Borges, 322). Or to
take another example from Pozzos famous speech in Waiting for
Godot:
Have you not done tormenting we with your accursed time!
Its abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough
for you, one day like any other day, one day he went dumb,
one day I went blind, one day well go deaf, one day we
were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same sec-
ond, is that not enough for you? (Beckett 1985b, 89)
Thus Frank Kermode writes of Becketts temporality: Time is an
endless transition from one condition of misery to another, a passion
without form or stations []. It is a world crying out for apocalypse;
all it gets is vain temporality, mad, multiform antithetical influx
(Kermode, 115).
Jameson associates this series of pure and unrelated presents in
time (Jameson 27) with postmodernisms crisis of historicity, and
comments that some of Becketts narratives are [] of this order,
most notably Watt, where a primacy of the present sentence in time
ruthlessly disintegrates the narrative fabric that attempts to reform
around it (Jameson, 28). For Jameson, this incapacity or unwilling-
ness to make historical sense of the present amounts to an ideological
refusal to confront contemporary reality. Jamesons epochal model
of postmodernism stresses its discontinuity, its rupture with modern-
ism issuing in a historical impasse. Kermode, on the other hand, un-
derlines Becketts continuity with the modernism of Proust:
In Proust, whom Beckett so admires, the order, the forms of
the passion, all derive from the last book; they are positive.
In Beckett, the signs of order and form are more or less con-
tinuously presented, but always with a sign of cancellation;
they are resources not to be believed in, cheques which will
415
bounce. [] But of course it is this order, however ironised,
this continuously transmitted idea of order, that makes
Becketts point.
(Kermode, 115)
Where Jameson dismisses Becketts temporality as postmodern nihil-
ism, Kermode seeks to rescue Becketts signs of order as a last-ditch
recovery of a quasi-religious form of continuity. I would like to pro-
pose a different understanding of Beckettian temporality, based on the
work of Jean-Franois Lyotard, that resists both Jamesons epochal
model of the end of history, and Kermodes model of a continuously
transmitted idea of order.
One of the most influential definitions of postmodernity is Jean-
Franois Lyotards formulation in The Postmodern Condition, where
he associates postmodernity with an attitude of incredulity towards
meta-narratives (Lyotard 1984, xxiv). While this aspect of Lyotards
thesis has been widely influential the collapse of meta-narratives
leading to postmodernist scepticism about progress, enlightenment,
the unfinished project of modernity what is less often remarked is
how Lyotards discussion of the postmodern subtly undermines its
own epochal implications, its reading of the postmodern as a succes-
sor to modernism.
In The Postmodern Condition Lyotard makes the surprising
claim: A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern.
Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the
nascent state, and this state is constant (Lyotard 1984, 79). This con-
struction of postmodernism as a latency within modernism is at odds
with the epochal implications of the term itself, leading Lyotard later
to revisit the concept:
Postmodern is probably a very bad term because it con-
veys the idea of a historical periodization. Periodizing
however, is still a classic or modern ideal. Postmodern
simply indicates a mood, or better, a state of mind.
(Lyotard 1986-7, 209)
Lyotards most notable rethinking of postmodernism is in the essay
Rewriting Modernity. Rewriting modernity, Lyotard argues, is a
416
better way of understanding postmodernism because it emphasises the
extent to which the postmodern is a work carried out within the terms
of modernity:
the postmodern is always implied in the modern because of
the fact that modernity, modern temporality, comprises in it-
self an impulsion to exceed itself into a state other than it-
self. [] Modernity is constitutionally and ceaselessly preg-
nant with its postmodernity.
(Lyotard 1991, 25)
Lyotard then goes on to distinguish two models of re-writing: re-
writing as the revolutionary gesture of wiping the slate clean and
starting the clock again from zero, and the model of re-writing asso-
ciated with psychoanalysis, Durcharbeitung, or working through.
Citing Freud, Lyotard further distinguishes between repetition, re-
membering and working through. If repetition is a kind of paraly-
sis, the symptomatic temporality of the neurotic, the process of re-
membering, as an Oedipal search for the origin or hidden cause of
ones sufferings, is little better, tending merely to perpetuate the crime
rather than putting an end to it (Lyotard 1991, 28).
Instead, Lyotard stresses the value of the concept of Durchar-
beitung, of working through, arguing that Freud himself abandons
the ideal of a cure based on a definitive remembering of first causes,
and instead opens himself [] to the idea that the cure could be,
must be, interminable (Lyotard 1991, 30). Thus, for Lyotard, con-
trary to remembering, working through would be defined as a work
without end and therefore without will; without end in the sense in
which it is not guided by the concept of an end (Lyotard 1991, 30).
For Lyotard, this is an essentially constructive process, a means
of going on without succumbing to the desire for narrative closure.
This model of working through seems to me a useful way of think-
ing about Becketts work, which can be read as a kind of critical re-
writing of modernity that denies itself the solace of kairos, of an
ending that would explain, illuminate and redeem Lost Time, that is
dedicated, instead, simply to chronos, to putting one damn thing after
another, to going on.
*****
417
Finally, a further distinction can be made between modernist and
Beckettian time in terms of Lyotards aesthetics of the sublime.
Kants definition of the sublime is based on its distinction from
the beautiful: where the beautiful concerns the form of the object,
which consists in its being bounded, the sublime is associated with
the formless, with a quality of unboundedness (Kant, 265). The
essence of the sublime is its endlessness: it is a vastness that cannot be
apprehended all at once by the imagination; instead, the mind must
draw upon its capacity of reason to comprehend the magnitude of the
sublime, a process which involves a mingling of pleasure and dis-
pleasure: a displeasure arising from the failure of the imagination to
grasp the object, and a pleasure arising from the confirmation of the
superiority of the rational vocation of our cognitive powers, over the
greatest power of sensibility (Kant, 269).
In an aesthetic sense, therefore, the sublime is unpresentable:
by definition it exceeds both perception and imagination, and can only
be intuited by an exercise of rational thought. Lyotard distinguishes
between modern and postmodern versions of the sublime. Arguing
that modernism (Proust is one of his examples) is concerned with the
task of enabling the perception of something which does not allow
itself to be made present (Lyotard 1984, 80), Lyotard argues that, by
figuring the unpresentable as lost, the modernist sublime is essen-
tially nostalgic:
It allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as the
missing contents; but the form, because of its recognisable
consistency, continues to offer to the reader or viewer matter
for solace and pleasure. Yet these sentiments do not consti-
tute the real sublime sentiment, which is an intrinsic combi-
nation of pleasure and pain: the pleasure that reason should
exceed all presentation, the pain that imagination or sensi-
bility should not be equal to the concept.
(Lyotard 1984, 81)
The Beckettian sublime, I would argue, inheres in its evocation of
chronos. It is impossible for us to perceive the infinity of passing
time; it is only by an effort of rational thought that we can compre-
hend even small magnitudes of elapsed time, such as the span of a
418
human life. Thus Becketts characters are always trying to calculate
the number of minutes they have been alive, or the number of steps
they have taken in a lifetime of aimless wandering, or the number of
times they have encircled the earth.
But the sublime also requires a painful sensation that alerts the
senses to their incapacity to apprehend its immensity. To give just one
example, one of my favourite passages in Waiting for Godot has al-
ways been the exchange between Vladimir and Estragon after the
departure of Pozzo and Lucky:
VLADIMIR: That passed the time.
ESTRAGON: It would have passed in any case.
VLADIMIR: Yes, but not so rapidly.
(Beckett 1985b, 48)
For a long time this last line irritated me. It seemed to rescue a har-
rowing perception of the indifference of chronos, of a time that
would have passed in any case, with the platitudinous consolations
of kairos (time flies when youre having fun). Many years later I
realised that, in the context of Becketts theatre, the last line Yes,
but not so rapidly might be taken ironically. With its agonising
temporality of waiting, its wearying pauses, and the sputtering ex-
haustion of its dialogue, the theatrical time of Waiting for Godot has
been slowed down to the tempo of chronos: rather than it passing the
time, time just passes, at the rate of exactly one second per second.
Thus Beckett can be seen as rewriting the temporality of mod-
ernism, but with all the modernity taken out. Time is deprived of the
values that belong to kairos: meaningfulness, transcendence, a specific
relation to origins and ends. Stripped back to chronos, to isolated sec-
onds of one damn thing after another, time is not obliterated, it is
revealed.
419
Works cited
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Nothing and How It Is, in The Cambridge Companion to Beckett,
ed. John Pilling (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), 106-121.
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, Molloy (New York: Grove P, 1955).
, Endgame (London: Faber & Faber, 1958). (1958a)
, The Unnamable (New York: Grove P, 1958). (1958b)
, Proust, in Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London:
Calder, 1965), 7-93.
, Worstward Ho (London: Calder, 1983).
, The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber & Faber,
1985). (1985a)
, Waiting for Godot (London: Faber & Faber, 1985). (1985b)
, The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York:
Grove P, 1995).
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