Abstract
The conclusion reads how Beckett’s perennial obsessions regarding vision and representation are crystallised in the theme of unspeakability in Beckett’s poem “What Is the Word” and the figure of the eye in Beckett’s late prose text Ill Seen Ill Said. In light of the previous chapters’ detailed analyses of Beckett’s aesthetic lineages, these obsessions are shown to recall his essays’ guiding anxieties about the status of representation. The study ends by calling for an understanding of Beckettian influence modelled after vibrations and figural affinities.
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Notes
- 1.
Especially the perspectivalist “mental gaze” of the decarnalised eye. Jay , Downcast Eyes, 69–70, 166, 435.
- 2.
Laura Salisbury, “‘What Is the Word’: Beckett’s Aphasic Modernism,” Journal of Beckett Studies 17, nos. 1–2 (2008): 78–123.
- 3.
On Beckett’s late prose and the significance of the Noli me tangere iconographical tradition, see Houston Jones, Samuel Beckett and Testimony, 99–104.
- 4.
J.M. Coetzee, introduction to Beckett, Poems, Short Fiction, Criticism, vol. 4 of The Grove Centenary Edition, xiii.
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Lawrence, T. (2018). Conclusion. In: Samuel Beckett's Critical Aesthetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75399-7_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75399-7_6
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