Abstract
Forms of silence can serve as a signature of ‘creaturely life’: the suspended state of being in uncanny proximity with the nonhuman animal to which a subject is exposed when detached from the constitutive values and normative meanings that structure human life. The claim in this chapter is that Samuel Beckett’s Worstward Ho and J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K are both attentive to the estranged, elusive, ahistorical dimensions of creaturely life through the pursuit of a non-discursive state coinciding with the compulsion or solicitation to speak. In their varying ways of voicing silence, Beckett and Coetzee generate a fraternity with animals in exposing the human’s own potential intimacy with the embodied life beyond the symbolic order of language and narrative.
A whole world, that of nature and that of animals, is filled with silence. Nature and animals seem like protuberances of silence.
—Max Picard, The World of Silence (1948, 110)
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Works Cited
Attridge, Derek. 1992. “Oppressive Silence: J. M. Coetzee’s Foe and the Politics of the Canon,” In Decolonizing Tradition: New Views of Twentieth-century “British” Literary Canons, edited by Karen R. Lawrence, 212–238. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Beckett, Samuel. 2009. Company / Ill Seen Ill Said / Worstward Ho / Stirrings Still. London: Faber.
Beckett, Samuel. 2009 [1938]. Murphy. London: Faber.
Benjamin, Walter. 1999. Illuminations, translated by Harry Zorn. London: Pimlico.
Boxall, Peter. 2009. Since Beckett: Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism. London: Continuum.
Bryden, Mary. 1997. “Sounds and Silence: Beckett’s Music.” In Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui, Vol. 6, Crossroads and Borderlines, edited by Marius Buning, Sjef Houppermans, and Danièle de Ruyter, 279–288. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Coetzee, J. M. 2004 [1983]. Life and Times of Michael K. London: Vintage.
———. 1992. “Samuel Beckett and the Temptations of Style.” In Doubling the Point, edited by David Attwell. London: Harvard University Press.
Connor, Steven. 1992. “Negativity and the Question of Value: Beckett’s Worstward Ho.” Paragraph, 15 (2): 121–135.
Hassan, Ihab. 1967. The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Head, Dominic. 1997. J. M. Coetzee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hisgen, Ruud, and Adriaan van der Weel. 1997. “Worsening in Worstward Ho: A Brief Look at the Genesis of the Text.” In Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui, Vol. 6, Crossroads and Borderlines, edited by Marius Buning, Sjef Houppermans, and Danièle de Ruyter, 243–251. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Knowlson, James and Elizabeth Knowlson. 2006. Beckett Remembering, Remembering Beckett. New York: Arcade.
Kucala, Bozena. 2009. “Resisting History, Resisting Story: J. M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K.” In Voices and Silence in the Contemporary Novel in English, edited by Vanessa Guignery, 272–280. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars.
Levy, Eric P. 1980. Samuel Beckett and the Voice of Species. Totowa: Barnes & Noble.
Loevlie, Elisabeth Marie. 2003. Literary Silences in Pascal, Rousseau, and Beckett. Oxford: Oxford University.
McCullough, Lissa. 2001. “Silence.” In The Routledge Encyclopedia of Postmodernism, edited by Victor E. Taylor and Charles E. Winquist. London: Routledge.
Oliver, Kelly. 2009. Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to be Human. New York: Columbia University Press.
Parry, Benita. 1998. “Speech and Silence in the Fictions of J. M. Coetzee.” In Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995, edited by Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly, 149–165. London: Cambridge University Press.
Picard, Max. 1948. The World of Silence, translated by Stanley Godman. London: Harvill.
Pick, Anat. 2011. Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film. New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press.
Santner, Eric L. 2006. On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sontag, Susan. 2009 [1969]. “The Aesthetics of Silence.” In Styles of Radical Will. London: Penguin, 3–34.
Steiner, Gary. 2008. Animals and the Moral Community: Mental Life, Moral Status, and Kinship. New York: Columbia University Press.
Vermeulen, Pieter. 2015. Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel: Creature, Affect, Form. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wright, Laura. 2006. Writing “Out of All Camps”: J. M. Coetzee’s Narratives of Displacement. London: Routledge.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Anderton, J. (2017). “The Impulse Towards Silence”: Creaturely Expressivity in Beckett and Coetzee. In: Ohrem, D., Bartosch, R. (eds) Beyond the Human-Animal Divide. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-93437-9_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-93437-9_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-60309-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-93437-9
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)