Sans Cesse: Beckett, Proust, Knausgård

In his 1931 essay on Proust’s Recherche, Beckett outlines a “physiology of style” based on the “organic eccentricities” of memory and habit. Revisiting Proust with Beckett’s essay in mind, this chapter tracks the textual afterlife of an aesthetics emerging from an entanglement of minor derailments of memory and the body from Beckett’s prose to Karl Ove Knausgård’s Min Kamp. The main focus is on a type of memory pointed out by Beckett that does not fully coincide with Proust’s famous mémoire involuntaire: the “extreme cases,” in which “memory is so closely related to habit that its word takes flesh, and is not merely available in cases of urgency, but habitually enforced.” These cases become models for Beckett’s grotesque speakers, articulating their “organic eccentricities” ceaselessly in a space beyond active memory and consciousness; and they set the stage for Knausgård’s saga of dull habits. Following the image of “eccentric” hearts in Proust, Beckett, and Knausgård, the chapter investigates the ways in which a nexus between memory, habit, and physiology negotiated in the respective texts is acted out on the corporeal-material dimension of language.