Hesitancy in Joyce's and Beckett's Manuscripts

Abstract

centuries of using tools like the grid to create an illusion of reality, modernist artists started drawing attention to the painting's underlying grid to emphasize the discontinuity between reality and its presentation. Rosalind Krauss therefore regards the structure of the grid as emblematic of the modernist ambition (9). With reference to literature, Joyce's Finnegans Wake exemplifies the metafictional ways in which a text can draw attention to the underlying grid instead of hiding the traces of the writing process. Toward the end of the book, the text mentions the process of decomposition and subsequent recombination that characterizes the work (FW 614.35). To some extent Samuel Beckett has reversed this process in that his main focus is on the element of decomposition. Nonetheless, his writing method is not the complete opposite of Joyce's. Beckett also radicalized elements that were already present in Joyce's Work in Progress to draw attention to the underlying grid and thematize the creative act in an even more explicitly metafictional way than Joyce had done. To investigate this process, the notion of hesitancy in Joyce's and Beckett's works and manuscripts will serve as a focal point. During the writing of Finnegans Wake, Joyce decomposed excerpts from hundreds of source texts in the form of paratactic jottings in the Finnegans Wake notebooks; he subsequently recombined them in the drafts. Especially in the 1930s this process sometimes tended to become remarkably mechanical. For instance, when Joyce asked Mme. Raphael to make a transcription of the undeleted, that is, unused, entries from his notebooks into new ones (the so-called C-notebooks), she copied the original documents in random order. When she was copying entries from notebook VI.B.28 into notebook VI.C.09 and arrived at the last line of the last page, she just took a new notebook (VI.C.10) and continued with the next undeleted entry (green scarlet) from notebook VI.B.28. After VI.B.28 she copied VI.B.26, and then VI.B.23. When Joyce needed an extra paragraph to add to the July 1935 installment in transition 23, he took a notebook,