Abstract
Asking ‘How Beckett has modified modernism’ presupposes a definition of modernism and agency facing a critical consensus. Unlike the ‘historical’ avant-gardes, modernism as a category was applied retroactively to a preceding corpus. One often hears that modernism culminated in 1922, which situates Beckett as a belated ‘late modernist’. I would suggest a longer periodicity for modernism and see it continue after 1950. It would be represented by writers like Beckett and Coetzee and by theoreticians like Adorno, Greenberg, Bataille, Derrida, or Deleuze. Such a ‘late-late’ modernism will retroactively impact our current definitions of ‘high modernism’. Beckett contributed to this ongoing re-evaluation by transforming a few Proustian and Joycean premises. This essay focuses on Joyce’s later work and analyses how Beckett took over from Joyce a concept of the ‘posthuman’ that he deployed in The Unnamable. It requires to be interpreted with the help of the theories of the philosophers quoted above.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
See Rabaté (2007).
- 3.
Deleuze and Guattari write, ‘The body without organs is an egg: it is crisscrossed with axes and thresholds, with latitudes and longitudes and geodesic lines, traversed by gradients marking the transitions and the becomings, the destinations of the subject developing along these particular vectors’ (2004: 19).
- 4.
Arthur Rimbaud’s ‘L’impossible’ figures in A Season in Hell (in Rimbaud 1986: 337–40). The French poet Bonnefoy took this concept to be Rimbaud’s central concern; see Bonnefoy (1973: 45). Similarly, Bataille keeps using the concept in various essays on poetry, taking it as the title of a prose text that concludes as poetry, L’Impossible, a book that Beckett may well have read. See Bataille (2004: 489–563).
- 5.
- 6.
See Adorno (2006).
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Rabaté, JM. (2018). How Beckett Has Modified Modernism: From Beckett to Blanchot and Bataille. In: Beloborodova, O., Van Hulle, D., Verhulst, P. (eds) Beckett and Modernism. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70374-9_2
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