The Matter of Absence

Abstract

In Beckett’s poem ‘what is the word’, he seems to ask a more fundamental question than in the French original, ‘Comment dire’. Rather than a – crucially unsuccessful – search for ‘le mot juste’, ‘what is the word’ is also a linguistic quest for the ontology of the word.1 What is the word? Is it just a vehicle to bring across a message, or does it have a materiality of its own? Can it be a ‘thing’? And what if this ‘thing’ is crossed out? This essay tries to approach Beckett’s late poetry from a ‘materialist’ perspective in the sense that it takes the materiality of its inscription (ink on paper) as a starting point. It suggests a reading of Beckett’s late poems as he preserved them (in line with the edition of Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems in The Gorgeous Nothings)2; a reading that takes the deliberate ‘scrappiness’ of their drafts into account as an extra dimension and as an integral part of the poetic experience; a reading that helps us refine our notion of presence, find out more about its relation to absence, and perhaps understand how certain forms of absence can also have agency. This materialist perspective does not imply a strictly bibliographical approach, without any relation to the content of these late poems. The profound connection between content and form that Beckett discovered in Joyce’s ‘Work in Progress’ (‘His writing is not about something; it is that something itself’3), became a fundamental characteristic of his own ‘oeuvre in gress’,4 ending in the middle of a sentence (in ‘what is the word’). To the extent that this enactment is a crucial aspect of what H. Porter Abbott has called ‘autography’, I would like to take this autography more literally than Abbott probably intended it: the ‘form’ enacting the ‘content’ of the late poetry also encompasses the autographs (the drafts and notes).