“Torn by Enormous Pauses”

Abstract

Abstract Like Beckett’s description of Beethoven’s seventh symphony as a “sound surface, torn by enormous pauses,” the language surface in How It Is is broken by typographic spaces. Drawing on the imagery in the German Letter in conjunction with two similar aesthetic metaphors—Hölderlin’s theory of tragic caesurae as “counter-rhythmic rupture[s]” and Deleuze’s understanding of Beckett’s “pure images” as “holes” in language—I identify two types of caesurae in How It Is. Finally, after establishing the way in which Hölderlin’s caesura and Deleuze’s “pure image” overlap, I locate the work’s most fundamental rupture and propose that, in a reading based purely on form, this rupture has a pivotal function comparable to the turning point of a conventional novel.