Samuel Beckett's Lessness: An exercise in decomposition

Abstract

In 1969 Samuel Beckett published a short book, Sans; his English translation, Lessness, appeared the following year.1 Lessness takes up a continuing story where Beckett's previous short fictions Imagination Dead Imagine (1965) and Ping (1966) left off. In these works first two naked bodies, then only one, lie in a tomb-like, womb-like structure where the light waxes and wanes inexplicably and an unspecified event, "ping," occurs irregularly. In Lessness the structure has fallen into ruin, exposing the naked figure to the elements. The story line is pretty minimal, and so are the texts: Imagination Dead Imagine about 1,100 words, Ping about 1,000, Lessness about 1,500. Imagination Dead Imagine is conventional though elliptic in its syntax; Ping and Lessness mark a stylistic departure. The remarks that follow concern the structure of Lessness but may be taken over, with minor modifications, to Ping. Lessness displays features not often encountered in connected discourse. The most notable is finiteness: whereas normal discourse draws upon a word-stock which in any theorizing must be treated as infinite, Lessness clearly signals that its word-stock is finite. The signal is this: whereas in normal discourse each extension of the length of the text adds, though more and more slowly, to the number of different lexical items called on (the phenomenon described in the so-called Zipf-Mandelbrot Law), Lessness calls on 166 lexical items in its first half and not a single new one in its second half; furthermore, it displays (flaunts?) a compositional procedure which would allow it to extend its length almost infinitely without drawing on new items. Words 770-1,538 of the text turn out to be nothing but words 1-769 in a new order. It is this fact which suggests a mathematical approach to the text, an approach not only via the mathematics of indeterminacy, namely probability theory, which we use to compare properties of an infinite set (a language) with those of a finite subset (a text in that language), but also via combinatorial mathematics. A mathematical approach of some kind is certainly invited by a work which, like the combinatorial poems of Emmett Williams, overlays natural syntax with its own syntax of combination, thereby pushing into the foreground its rule-governedness and presenting itself as linguistic game rather than linguistic expression. Here, first of all, is a taste ofLessness. I quote paragraphs 1 and 22 entire.