The Question of Blanchot in Beckett’s Three Dialogues and The Unnamable

Abstract

Abstract While the possible influence of the French writer Maurice Blanchot on Samuel Beckett’s writing has long been one of the more vexing questions in Beckett scholarship, textual echoes, thematic correspondences and circumstantial clues now make it likelier than not that Beckett encountered Blanchot’s writing in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The personal documents of Georges Duthuit—Beckett’s close friend in this period, during the writing of both Three Dialogues (1949) and the ‘Trilogy’ of novels (1951–1953)—shed further light on this connection. They suggest that Three Dialogues is a continuation of Beckett’s decades-long thought on habit, as first articulated in Proust (1930), and that Duthuit (re)introduced Beckett to Blanchot’s work at the time of writing Three Dialogues. This article explores connections between Blanchot’s Thomas l’obscur (1941) and ‘De l’angoisse au langage’ (1943), and published and manuscript versions of Beckett’s Three Dialogues and L’Innommable, as well as between the problematics posed by the latter two texts. Finally, it suggests that L’Innommable is not a reflection but a radicalization of Blanchot’s thought, such that Blanchot missed the full extent of its radicality in his own review of the novel.