Ill Said Research Articles

더 나은 배관설비를 위하여: 베케트 후기 작품에 나타난 King Lear에 대한 문학적 암시

This paper tries to understand the nature of Beckett’s literary allusion by way of analyzing the literary allusions to King Lear appearing in his later English texts. King Lear and Beckett’s works bear similarities in terms of the theme of the failure of divine reward, the experiment in human misery and sufferings and the element of the grotesque pantomime. As a frame of reference for our study, there are three major case studies on Beckett’s literary allusions respectively undertaken by Gontarski, Knowlson and Caselli, which respectively shed light on the echoes in the mythical patterns, the generality of quotation and its sensory embodiment and the self-reflective and ironical intertextuality. As this paper analyzes Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho and Endgame as the three representative cases of Beckett’s literary allusion to King Lear, Ill Seen Ill Said’s quotation of “vile jelly” is, firstly, found to create profound thematic echoes between the fruitless efforts of its camera-eye and those of Gloucester in King Lear. In terms of the general quotation and its sensory embodiment, the text echoes the senility dramatized in King Lear by materializing the frailty of the one frail remaining eye and the abject body of the old woman. The case of ironical intertextuality in the work is performed in the way in which, the better one understands King Lear, the better one can understands the work in allusion to it itself, as a subtle device in the text bringing about the inversion between origin and product. Worstward Ho sets Edgar’s line “the worst is not so long as we can say ‘This is the worst’” as a very important preoccupation as well as the most important thematic thread in the work. Endgame illustrates similarities to, and influences from, King Lear in its ethos and pathos. Peter Brook’s iconic 1962 production King Lear so effectively witnessed to and exploited those similarities as to alter the general interpretation as well as the critical opinion of the Shakespearean original. As Beckett himself explained, these literary allusions are like “bits of pipe” that he carefully and meticulously chose for a better working literary construction.

Sexuality after Life

Abstract This article teases out intertextual threads from the visual arts and image-lore that join Beckett’s Dream of Fair to Middling Women to Ill Seen Ill Said. It explores how Beckett’s treatment of gender and sexual desire are deeply informed by Western art history’s specific gender dyad. It argues that Beckett harnesses and agitates this dyad to provoke new understandings of sexuality, sight and sense. By engaging key events in Dream and Ill Seen it unfolds an erotics of nonrelation: the sexual dimension of Beckett’s work that admits the dead and inorganic encrypted and insisting within the all too human.

Worsening Shades

Abstract Beckett’s late prose texts Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho perform a radical process of literary reimagination late in a long writing career: they reconfigure how biography relates to narrative, and they rethink the dimensionality and mobility of character. In their negotiations with literary history and etymology these texts replenish the stocks of language across the deep time of its evolution and its accrual of semantic and associative richness. In their rich geological and archaeological dispositions, the three texts of Nohow On demonstrate how deep time intersects with the narrative present in images of the earth, providing a locus for life and afterlife: both in the sense of the posthumous condition and in offering belated aesthetic possibilities.

Samuel Beckett and the Death of Representation: Rockaby, Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho

The article explores not only the link between Samuel Beckett’s final two novellas and the late drama but also seeks to demonstrate the author’s intent on stripping away the symbolism and imagery within his work in order to expose a life lived through the prism of representation; and, finally, to use his art to suggest something of the ‘real’ beneath the representational world. In this way the article demonstrates that the apotheosis of Beckett’s entire oeuvre is to reduce his narrative and dramas to a single work which finds its most comprehensive embodiment in his final novella: Worstward Ho.

“On”: Reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road through Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Ill Seen Ill Said

ABSTRACT The quality of Cormac McCarthy’s dialogue with Beckett in The Road is substantial yet often subtle, and McCarthy’s employment of particularly the Beckettian intertexts Waiting for Godot and of Ill Seen Ill Said enables him to not only pay homage to a literary master of his but also to re-accentuate Beckett’s existential concerns and to infuse them with a surprising sacramental turn of his own in his portrayal of the father and son’s loving relationship and in his treatment of the son as divine. Finally, like Beckett’s works, it is difficult to “exit” The Road, as McCarthy’s conclusion leads us into new imaginings and mysteries—new ways to travel down and perceive this fictional road trip again.

Old Age and Samuel Beckett’s Late Works


 
 
 Old age featured in Samuel Beckett’s plays and novels throughout his literary career. This paper explores the question of how—or indeed if—Beckett’s own experience of aging and old age affected the representation of age in his late works. Focusing upon his last two trilogies, the plays Not I, Footfalls, and Rockaby and the novellas Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho, I argue that Beckett’s late-life literary preoccupations were little affected by the corporeality of his own aging. Even in the last year of his life, he still sought to put down through dramatic images and words the ontological issues that had always concerned him. Hopes that his own old age might lead him closer to the edge—closer to what has been termed “the event horizon of the fourth age,” where subjectivity implodes—were not fulfilled, although arguably he did feel, at times, that he was getting closer to it, stylistically perhaps, if not in substance. To what extent Beckett’s later works serve as examples of a “late style” and to what extent they represent the continuing elaboration of a cultural imaginary of “old age” that he first deployed in his original trilogy, Molloy,Malone Dies, and The Unnameable, are difficult to ascertain. What is clear is that Beckett’s literary old age remained a symbolic imaginary, realized differ- ently than in his earlier work but scarcely more connected with his own later life.
 
 

‘In the dim light’: Archaeoastronomy in Beckett's Ill Seen Ill Said

Beckett's Ill Seen Ill Said begins with the protagonist in a position where ‘she sees Venus rise followed by the sun.’ This opening indicates the direct relationship between the narrative and astronomical phenomena of Venus rising as the morning star to mark the winter solstice and the alignments of megalithic structures built in correlation to this event. This paper traces the ways in which Ill Seen Ill Said uses the process of astronomy, the mapping of stars and planets, coinciding with megalithic stone structures, studied through the discipline known as archaeoastronomy, as a device for the creation of the narrative.

Wordly Corrasions: Philology and Narrative inWorstward Ho

Scholarly research over the last twenty years has marked a profound shift in the understanding of Beckett's sources, his methods of composition, and his attitudes towards citation and allusion in manuscript documents and published texts. Such landmark studies as James Knowlson's biography, Damned to Fame (1996), and John Pilling's edition of the Dream Notebook (1999), and the availability of primary documents such as Beckett's reading notes at Reading and Trinity libraries, opened the way for a generation of work rethinking Beckett's textual habitus. Given this profound reappraisal of Beckett's material processes of composition, this paper seeks to show that Beckett's late prose work, Worstward Ho, represents a profound mediation on writing, self-citation, and habits of allusion to the literary canon. In its epic gestures, it reorients the heavenly aspiration of Dante's Commedia earthwards, invoking instead the language of agriculture, geology and masonry in the process of creating and decreating its imaginative space. Beckett's earthy epic invokes and erodes the first principles of narrative by way of philology as well as by means of deft reference to literary texts and images preoccupied with land, farming, and geological formations. This process is described in the word corrasion, a geological term referring to the erosion of rock by various forms of water, ice, snow and moraine. Textual excursions into philology in Worstward Ho also unearth the strata comprising Beckett's corpus (in particular Imagination Dead Imagine, The Lost Ones, and Ill Seen Ill Said), as well as the rock or canon upon which his own literary production is built. A close reading of Worstward Ho turns up a number of shrewd allusions to the King James Bible and Thomas Browne, as one might expect, but also perhaps surprisingly sustained affinities with the literary sensibilities of Alexander Pope and the poetry of S. T. Coleridge. The more one digs, the more Beckett's ‘little epic’ seems to become one of earthworks, bits of pipe, and masonry, a site and record of literary sedimentation.

“Haze Sole Certitude”: Beckett's Late Vaguenings

Samuel Beckett pursues a practice of “vaguening” his late work as a strategy that eschews an art of clarity in pursuit of vagueness as an aesthetic value in itself. Beckett’s concern with the aesthetics of vagueness can be traced back to his earliest fiction and poetry, and his evolving ideas reflect and illuminate other theories of vagueness in art, from Keats’s Negative Capability to postmodern theories of “fuzzy fiction.” After an aesthetic turning point in 1962, when he advocated a “new form” in art that will “allow the mystery to invade us,” vagueness begins to dominate his late work, finding its fullest expression in Ill Seen Ill Said. Ultimately, Beckett aims not to thematize vagueness, but to reveal it—to embody the vague in art.

Ending the Mother Ghost: Beckett's Ill Seen Ill Said and Rockaby

This paper looks at two late texts written in 1981 by Samuel Beckett, the novel Ill Seen Ill Said a nd the play Rockaby , and reads them as difficult Oedipal elegies for his mother May Beckett who had died thirty years previously. The close reading of the texts brings out the conflicted psychoanalytic contradictions of the representations, especially the son’s strange identification with the mother brought on by the fact Beckett was himself approaching his mother’s age when she died. The close readings also argue for a ‘sentimental’ reading of the lyric patterning of both novel and play at key moments, using Simone de Beauvoir’s work on old age and her mother’s death as reference points. The article ends with a definition of the Oedipal identification as a Memnon complex, where the son and mother fuse together as writing and dying subjects.

Witnessness: Beckett, Dante, Levi, and the Foundations of Responsibility

Witnessness: Beckett, Dante, Levi, and the Foundations of Responsibility

‘Ill buttoned’ : Comparing the representation of objects in Samuel Beckett'sIll Seen Ill Saidand Gertrude Stein'sTender Buttons

This article argues for a reconsideration of Gertrude Stein's influence on the development of Samuel Beckett's aesthetics of language, together with the overall comparability of their work. The article will demonstrate that when read through the context of Beckett's observations on Stein in the 1937 German letter, their respective approaches towards the same operation, namely the logographic representation of a word in other words, is highly comparable. The article forwards Stein's Tender Buttons as a text that can be considered highly compatible with Beckett's observations on Stein in the German letter and argues for a reconsideration of the avenues through which Beckett may have encountered Stein's work, specifically in relation to the magazine transition. The article subsequently compares Stein's representation of objects in Tender Buttons (published in transition 14), with excerpts from Beckett's Murphy and Watt, followed by an extended analysis of Ill Seen Ill Said.

'Till Nohow On' - The Later Metafiction of Samuel Beckett

This paper examines some of Samuel Beckett's late narratives (Company, Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho and Stirrings Still), with a focus on the evolution of his metafictional techniques, and more specifically the growing importance acquired by the thematization of the compositional process itself, as well as the attention paid to closure. These texts are interpreted here as explorations of the element of reading inherent to writing (implied reception). The paper also analyzes the stylistics of Beckett's prose and discusses its significance.

The On-tology of Beckett’s Nohow On

“Not ‘trilogy,’ I beseech you” was Samuel Beckett response when the idea of giving his three post-war novels the title of trilogy was first floated by his editor John Calder (Ackerley and Gontarski, 586). Editorial pressure prevailed, however, and the word trilogy was subsequently accepted by the public, scholars and, albeit grudgingly, by Beckett himself. The publication of Beckett’s late-career narratives, Company, Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho gave rise to a similar controversy. When John Calder first published the three prose texts in Britain under the single title Nohow On, John Banville from the Irish Times objected that creating in this way a de facto trilogy goes against the spirit in which the texts were produced. Again, the publishers persisted in their designs, leading once more to a general consensus regarding the term “second trilogy,” sometimes appearing as “micro-trilogy.” As insignificant as it appears, the tale of the two trilogies mimics one of the central dilemmas of Beckett’s works, namely the chronic difficulty of identifying a thing with its name. It points, in other words, to the fact of “ill-saying” that gives Beckett’s prose its aesthetic principle while at the same time presenting it with its greatest creative challenge. It is perhaps to the “ill-named” trilogies that Beckett unsuspectingly refers when he writes, in Ill Seen Ill Said: “The mind betrays the treacherous eyes and the treacherous word their treacheries. Haze sole certitude” (78). 1 This paper will follow the French philosopher Alain Badiou’s assertion that Beckett’s “ill-saying” is an ontological problem rather than one that pertains simply to representational technique. In his Beckett: L’increvable desir, translated by Nina Power and Albert Toscano as Tireless Desire, Badiou confesses to having in his youth misread Beckett as an account of man living in despair in a universe without God, and without meaning or love. Spurning the “young cretin” that enthusiastically embraced such a stereotypical humanist and existentialist reading of Beckett, Badiou now returns to Beckett’s work with the intention of sketching its peculiar “methodological ascesis.” For this, he says, is the key to understanding how the Irish writer addresses the eminent philosophical question: “what

Book Review: Interpreting Narrative in the Novels of Samuel Beckett

By Jonathan Boulter. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. ISBN 0-8130-2106-5. Pp. 158. $55.00. To justify the offering of his book, Jonathan Boulter describes the Beckett academic community as caught between two extremes of novels. first method allegorical an approach that leans obtuse texts against some philosophical or literary structure exterior them and attempts explain what the texts are saying. second a poststructural emphasis on pure textuality, the endless play of the subject, and aporia of Boulter situates his own approach between these two methods as a balance between extremes of textuality and extremes of allegory (4). Drawing on Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutics of as a dialogue, Boulter acknowledges a disjunction between Gadamer's claim that meaning can exist only within the structures of language and the problem that language consistently falls back on itself, referring (Boulter claims) only its own failure mean (2). He also assumes as seminal his approach Paul Ricoeur's theory of appropriation, which describes a reader's interpreting his own selfhood through his understanding of a text. This hermeneutics also problematized by the aporetic nature of texts (5-6). invocation of Gadamer and Ricoeur, theorists not ordinarily linked with Beckett, prepares us for Boulter's premise that the of Beckett a the texts, which to place his or her against (or within) the already in place in the (3). This responsibility obligatory or because it requires one some hermeneutical reading of a text (7). This obliged, ethical specular--that is, he engaged in a dilemma that mirrors that of a Beckett character or voice, who likewise engaged in linguistic struggle. has no choice but make sense of all discursive acts in the texts because, in a very real sense, the [discursive] acts of the character become the acts of the reader (10-11). Close attention Boulter's language at this point reveals, however, that he not claiming that a text necessarily meaningful but rather that, for the hermeneutical process he describing operate, the text must remain open meaning. He insisting that his emphasis on the necessity of a reader's interpretive encounter with works, with the selections for this study being Watt (1959), Mercier and Camier (1970), Malone Dies (1965), Unnamable (1965), How It Is (1964), and a conclusion focused on Endgame (1958), Company (1980), Ill Seen Ill Said (1981), and Worstward Ho (1983). Boulter's underlying claim that prose works are about hermeneutics; they are about the of language. Beckett's primary concern in his novels Boulter states, is the question of interpretation (2). The novels, in short, are about the philosophical-hermeneutical grounds of understanding, a theme that other critics have missed and that he now addressing (4). Thus, we will not proceed read Boulter's book learn what the scenes, events, and characters portray as literature. Instead, we will be instructed in how the joins the Beckettian character in absolute proximity as both explore hermeneutical positions. Boulter's first chapter appropriately an analysis of Watt, first work that has as a central concern the struggle with language and the essential linguistic nature of experience (17). key word for grasping the import of this analysis parody. Earlier allegorical readings of the novel find Watt's heroic struggles uncover the mysteries of Mr. Knott and his estate represent the quest discover the metaphysical truth about the human situation. Thrown (as in Martin Heidegger) into the inevitability of this quest, Watt ends not only in bafflement and distress but also in rational and linguistic bankruptcy: he can no longer join letters into words into sentences that make sense. …

Beckett and Proust

Not only does this book contain major analyses of Beckett's essay Proust, and of his first unpublished novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, but also discussions of his latest prose works, Company, Ill Seen, Ill Said and Westward Ho. Contents: Proust and Critical Perspectives; Positive Modes of Existence in^R A la recherche du temps perdu; Negative Modes of Existence in A la recherche du temps perdu; Nihilistic Modes of Existence in A la recherche du temps perdu; Beckett's ProustsoThe Singular and the Multipe; Beckett's Interpretation of the 'Albertine Tragedy'; Beckett and the 'Paradox' of the 'Mystical Experience'; Beckett and Critical Perspectives; Beckett, Proust, and Dream of Fair to Middling Women; The Evolution of Beckett's Early Fictional Vision in More Pricks Than Kicks and Murphy; Watt and the Problem of Intelligibility; Beckett's Mature FictionoFrom 'Shit' to 'Shades'; Conclusion: 'not life/necessarily'oBeckett's 'Shades'; Notes; Selected Bibliography; Index^R