Beckett after Wittgenstein: The Literature of Exhausted Justification

Abstract

Ludwig Wittgenstein's closely related critiques of language, Cartesian skepticism, inner criteria, and hermeneutics have instructive parallels in the work of Samuel Beckett, whose avowed interest in Wittgenstein's philosophy elucidates, for example, the treatment of expectation in Waiting for Godot, of solipsism in Company, and of rule following in Endgame and What Where. Wittgenstein's insistence that interpretation is not compulsory but remedial, resting on a primitive rule-following competence that permeates our “forms of life” and thus our language, endorses the antimetaphysical dramaturgy Beckett developed while directing stage and screen productions of his own writing. Adapting Wittgenstein's concept of “family resemblance” to an exemplary conjunction of philosophy and literature, this essay proposes that Beckett's works are less aporetic scenarios of deferral and undecidability than meticulous representations of the largely unarticulated convergent behaviors constituting forms of life. As a director, Beckett could draw from Wittgenstein clarifying confirmation of an aesthetic practice that, like the Philosophical Investigations, begins “where interpretation comes to an end.”