Calculating Humans: Samuel Beckett’s Encipherment

Chapter four argues Samuel Beckett attempted to write a new form of modernist novel by narrating events and characters of which the author has no direct knowledge. Inspired by early digital techniques of encipherment and encryption, Beckett used such techniques while writing to algorithmically generate the events of his Trilogy. The chapter begins by discussing basic encipherment techniques and showing their use in two experiments that took place at roughly the same time: the development of the first computer and the composition of Beckett’s Trilogy. From here, it goes on to show where Beckett’s thinking on digital media draws from and also extends Proust’s media aesthetics. Coinciding with a digital ethos, Beckett’s digital writing process proceeds from the belief that text can be algorithmically transformed to reverse-engineer material phenomena too small or too distant to be perceived directly. By the start of World War II and as evidenced in Beckett’s algorithmic writing practices, media were no longer seen as gateways to the past but as portals to invisible layers of the material present. The magic of the early twentieth century had been replaced by the anxieties of a frightening digital age and its invisible materialities.