Samuel Beckett's For to End Yet Again: A Conflict between "Syntax of Energy" and "Syntax of Weakness"

Abstract

After Comment c'est (1961) the size and scale of Samuel Beckett's prose writing diminishes considerably. This volte-face in his choice of expressive strategy-from baroque extravagances (How It Is 67) of his middle phase of fiction-writing toward and miniaturization-has drawn considerable attention from critics. Olga Bernal notices a disintegration of since Comment c'est (quoted in Sherzer 49). Raymond Federman characterizes this shift in Beckett's narrative method as delyricalise, to destylise the language of fiction, to designify the words (28). George Lukacs, from his socialist perspective, naturally dismisses Beckett's narrowing and apparently nonreferential scope of writing as an undesirable attenuation of reality.' Steven Connor, however, notes Beckett's later works evincing a new style gravitating toward a calm, calculated, scrupulous, though austere and disconcerting direction (93, 100). H. Porter Abbot argues that Beckett's later works are carefully structured upon radical displacements (224, 228). J. E. Dearlove and Laura Barge agree that Beckett's dramatic stylistic change is actually a logical development of his earlier practices. They sum up this emerging style as being characterized by, among other things, the concept of an integral self being collapsed into an impersonal and omniscient voice, a rigid, mathematical, scientific framework, and fragmentation of consciousness, being, and fiction (Dearlove, Last Image 105; Barge 277). This new direction of minimalist writing was prefigured in the thirteen Texts for Nothing (1950-52) and From an Abandoned Work (1955)