Between Fact and Fiction: The Nature of Events in Joyce and Beckett

Abstract

It is a commonplace of Beckett scholarship that his narratives dramatize a retreat from the possibility of narration. Expression fizzles out into voicelessness as the narrated world evaporates thinner with every new text. My aim in this paper is to present this feature of Beckettian poetics as the final phase in the development of an experimental narrative tradition inaugurated by Joyce. Like Beckett, Joyce views the task of writing fiction as a means of reflecting on the ontological structure of events, and thus of re-evaluating the purchase of truth across fictional and factual narrative information. As we shall see, both writers explore the idea that the geometry of relations between fact, fiction, and truth needs to be radically rethought. But whereas Beckett's work tends towards the realization of a purely fictional state, a state ideally withdrawn from the empirical world, Joyce's method is to level the ontological distinction between fact and fiction to a point where they become indissociable. By staging a dialogue between Beckett and the later Joyce, I wish to read their increasingly radical narrative innovations as examples of a peculiarly modernist engagement with the nature of factual and fictional truth. It seems that a discussion of the nature of truth in Modernism must always fall between two stools. One is too easily seduced by the encyclopedic sweep characteristic of many twentieth-century masterpieces. The promise of total cultural recall, that is to say, of a complete re-appropriation of the past, constitutes an unavoidable epistemic paradigm. Yet this very taste for accumulation and historical