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Title
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Beckett's technography : traces of radio in the late prose
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Author
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Abstract
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| This chapter traces the lasting impact of the radio medium on Samuel Beckett’s later prose, starting with 'The Unnamable'. When Beckett began work on 'How It Is', he again foregrounded the concepts of voice and listening, but in a way that is radically different. The discourse of 'The Unnamable' is shaped like a constant verbal stream or ‘logorrhoea’, which seemingly contradicts the failing nature of the voice on which it is based. Such a dissonance of form is avoided in 'How It Is', which is broken up, faltering, eaten into by white spaces and thus punctured but unpunctuated. Or, in the words of the text: ‘ill-said ill-heard ill-recaptured ill-murmured’. This ‘rupture of the lines of communication’, so characteristic of Beckett’s late prose, strikingly resembles his own failed attempts at trying to hear from Paris the BBC broadcasts of his radio plays and prose adaptations, which were often distorted by static and disintegrated within minutes. These influences of the medium can even be detected as late as 'Company', which compounds Beckett’s view on radio as a voice emerging from the dark with his description of the transistor device as a provider of company. As such, this chapter offers an illustration of Beckett’s ‘technographic’ and 'intermedial' poetics. |
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Language
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English
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Source (book)
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Samuel Beckett and technology / Kiryushina, G. [edit.]; et al.
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Publication
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Edinburgh
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Edinburgh University Press
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2021
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ISBN
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978-1-4744-6328-7
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Volume/pages
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p. 95-108
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Full text (publisher's version - intranet only)
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