Beckett's Dying Remains: The Process of Playwriting in the Ohio Impromptu Manuscripts

Abstract

Samuel Beckett's works originate as highly personal accounts of the author's life and gradually evolve into elusive, enigmatic texts. In Beckett's oeuvre, autobiography provides the foundation for writing that then undergoes a painstaking process that purges the text of the author's identity. It is as though Beckett records aspects of his past with the conscious intent of undoing them, paradoxically developing his texts out of the erasure of autobiography. Far from creating works of "cryptobiography," that is, works in which the author only remotely disguises his identity, Beckett aims "not so much to disguise autobiography as to displace and discount it". The progression of Beckett's manuscripts exposes this refusal to accept the very autobiography that spawns his creative material. In particular, the manuscripts of the late play Ohio Impromptu (1981), including the many unpublished false starts now housed at Reading University's Samuel Beckett Collection, exemplify Beckett's attempt to unwrite himself through what he once called his "literature of the unword". This essay focuses on these recently acquired manuscripts to illustrate how Beckett's unique process of self-erasure informs his final text. In order to elucidate this process before turning to the specific manuscripts, I introduce the concept of "derangement" and its contribution to Beckett's dying presence in his works.