Beckett, Confined (?): Creativity and Constraints in Life and Letters

Abstract

This article’s title, inspired in part by the recent pandemic, glosses different aspects of confinement that characterize both Beckett and his œuvre: spatial, cultural, physical and, most importantly, linguistic. The latter, as revealed famously in his 1937 “Letter to Axel Kaun”, foregrounds creativity as an act of “boring holes into language” to uncover the music, or silence, the something, or nothing, that lay beneath. Curiously, the second volume of The Letters of Samuel Beckett reveals that this fascination with drilling holes also played out in real life. At Ussy, in the late 1940s, a time of great productivity, Beckett was obsessively drawn to “an orgy of digging” actual holes in the earth to plant trees, a kinetics that functions metaphorically as an act of dispossession necessary to create but also as a gesture emulated poetically in his last works. This serendipitous conjunction of art and/in life as revealed in the correspondence highlights Beckett’s creative process as both excavatory and rhythmic—the dynamics informing his later works, in particular Worstward Ho. This reading of his last great work demonstrates the resonances between letters in the correspondence and those of literary texts as performative of his search for a new poetical language negotiating spaces of creativity and forces of constraint.