Materialisation and embodied subjectivity in Samuel Beckett’s late prose: the case of Worstward Ho (1983)

Abstract

ABSTRACTFrom the very beginning of his writing career, Samuel Beckett has been emphatically preoccupied with the representation of the body in his works; a theme that has been extensively discussed by Beckett criticism and one that has been approached in many different ways. This article examines how the notion of embodiment is treated in Beckett’s late prose work Worstward Ho (1983), a work which quite evidently deals with ideas and images of impotence, abstraction and reduction evident in the representations of the body, the subject and language within it. Looking at this work closely, the article argues that Worstward Ho is not an abstention from meaning and its materialisation, but one that paradoxically foregrounds that ‘something’ which remains an essential part of it, that is, embodied subjectivity. The question as to whether literature can ever eliminate its ‘material’ dimension is raised while, looking closely at the way in which the centrality and the necessity of the somatic manifests itself specifically in Beckett’s ‘abstractive’ language and images of impotence, the article, in light of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception, demonstrates the work’s very resistance to any reduction of the human to a purely disembodied consciousness or voice.