Terrible Materialities: Beckett, Language and Vision

Whilst illustrating spatial patterning in a late Modernist context, this chapter demonstrates a literary application to the patterns through the work of Beckett and Modernist techniques. Beckett understood that there were operations underlying the production of narrative and this chapter discusses how he sought to ‘un-arrive’ at written representation by undercutting the final salient product of text. This was of particular philosophical and aesthetic concern to Beckett and is witnessed by his attempts to overcome the end product of writing in favour of the process. Finding inspiration in the visual arts, particularly Impression, this chapter examines how he tries to achieve the same collaborative relationship with a reader as Impressionism does with its viewer. Comparing Beckett’s minimalism to Joyce’s maximalism, it is further argued in this chapter that Joyce’s punning produces the possibility of overloading the global properties of the visual perception with salient possibilities resulting in a complex and multiple series of accompanying visual images.