The endurance of utterance and the incorporeal in the writing of Samuel Beckett and J.M. Coetzee

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the works of Beckett and Coetzee, endurance in one’s being correlates to endurance in utterance. While both are relentlessly persistent, they are also constantly facing their demise and teeter on the verge of nonexistence in the form of death or the inadequacy or inability to utter. Yet it is precisely here that endurance sources its fuel: in failure and impotence, ineptitude and near-nothingness. In this article, I trace Beckett’s and Coetzee’s articulations of bringing this struggle to life and delineating how writing serves as a canvas to depict them and the means to allow them to unfold and transform in the process. Their work, I argue, commences from the premise that utterance (and writing, as one of its modalities) is, in fact, a necessity despite its frequent convergence with its impossibility. Approaching their texts from the perspective of a persevering body while also considering what subsists as the incorporeal allows for a new delineation of endurance of uttering and writing.