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BECKETT’S ENDLESSNESS:

Rewriting Modernity and the Postmodern Sublime

Russell Smith

This article considers the pervasiveness of the theme of ending both in Beckett’s work and in Beckett criticism. Accepting the view that Beck-ett’s experiments with narrative undermine the possibility of closure,the article examines the nature of Beckettian temporality, its sense of

“finality without end”, in relation to the temporality of postmodern-ism as discussed by Fredric Jameson and Frank Kermode. Drawing on the work of Jean-François Lyotard, the article seeks to understand

Beckettian temporality as neither a continuation of, nor a rupturewith, the time of modernity, but a “rewriting” akin to Freud’s inter-minable analysis.

“The end is in the beginning and yet you go on” (Beckett 1958a, 44).Hamm’s words in Endgame define as well as any others the nature of temporality in Beckett’s works: simultaneously a longing to end and

an imperative to go on. As The Unnamable’s narrator says, “Thesearch for the means to put an end to things, an end to speech, is whatenables the discourse to continue” (Beckett 1958b, 15).

Although a whole series of Beckett’s works, from The Unnam-able through to Stirrings Still , set themselves the task of making anending, it is widely accepted that ends, however desired, are never attained in Beckett’s fiction, and indeed that Beckett’s experimentswith narrative form explicitly undermine the possibility of coming toan end. By ending repeatedly, they fail to end definitively.

If Beckettian temporality is, in Moran’s fine phrase, “finalitywithout end” (Beckett 1955, 152), what can it mean to come “after Beckett”, as criticism surely must do, since Beckett never comes to an

end? How can we conceive of Beckett’s work in a way that neither condemns this endlessness as a denial of history, nor celebrates it inan incantation that signals a foreclosure of criticism?

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This article consists of two main parts. The first part, in threesections, reviews the ways in which Beckett’s works subvert the no-tion of an ending, examines the rhetoric of ending in Beckett criticism,and then considers Fredric Jameson’s condemnation of postmodern(and in passing, Beckettian) temporality as a kind of paralysis of his-torical development. The second part, also in three sections, considersBeckett’s narratives in the light of Frank Kermode’s classic study TheSense of an Ending , and then turns to the work of Jean-François Lyo-tard for two notions useful for re-thinking the relation between Beck-ettian time and postmodernity: the concepts of “rewriting modernity”and the “postmodern sublime”.

Part 1Beckett’s narratives evade closure in various ways, both in the char-acteristic structures of their “non-endings”, and in the ways the textsas a whole continually displace narrative sequence or development. Atthe same time, however, Beckett’s narratives continually wrestle withteleological tropes, with forms of narrative that would seem to providewhat H. Porter Abbott calls “an arrow of meaning” (Abbott, 110).

Among Beckett’s characteristic “non-endings”, a first examplemight be those texts that end with a repetition suggesting circularity,such as Waiting for Godot , most famously, but also, in a more extremeform, Play, which consists of the same text performed twice, sug-gesting an endless, hellish repetition.

A second form is the ending presented as an arbitrary cut in acontinuous and apparently endless stream of speech, such as the ter-minal “I’ll go on” of The Unnamable, or, in Not I , the fade-out on thewords “pick it up”, signifying a resumption of the flow of speech(Beckett 1985a, 223).

A third form is the text which breaks off suddenly, as if the jag-ged edge of an incomplete fragment, most notable in the texts Beckett

published as fragments: the Texts for Nothing , the Fizzles, and Froman Abandoned Work .

A fourth form is the text which ends with a supplement, such asWatt ’s famous addenda of “precious and illuminating material”(Beckett 1953, 247). The addenda destabilise the novel’s ending withwhat Derrida calls “the strange structure of the supplement” (Derrida,23), undermining any unity and completeness the novel might haveclaimed.




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A fifth form of non-ending relates to the characteristic texts of Beckett’s later period, most notably the “second trilogy” of Company,

Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho. These texts enact a verbal crea-tion and decreation of imagined worlds, in which, in Abbott’s words,the voice “packs up its construction” (Abbott, 115) at the end. Begin-ning with nothing – “Say a body. Where none” (Beckett 1983, 7) – thetext constructs a world, perhaps even a narrative, only then to disman-tle it, ending with the void with which it began. The gesture of erasurenevertheless leaves the cancelled contents faintly legible, as an “un-lessenable least” (Beckett 1983, 36).

Among Beckett’s strategies of narrative displacement, the most pervasive relates to the re-ordering of narrative sequence, in terms of

both the sequence of events and the sequence of their narration (therelation between histoire and récit in the terms used by GérardGenette). Thus Sam, the putative narrator of Watt , informs us at the

beginning of Part IV that Watt “told the beginning of his story, notfirst, but second” and told the end of his story “not fourth, but third”(Beckett 1953, 215). This might lead us to assume that the “real”ending of the novel is the conclusion of Part III. But to complicatematters further, Sam informs us that Watt was in the habit of makinginversions in the order of his speech – of letters in the word, of wordsin the sentence, of sentences in the period – leaving the “real” endingof Watt’s narrative completely indeterminable (Beckett 1953, 164-168).

Another more subtle means by which Beckett undermines thesense of an ending is the way in which, as Andrew Gibson notes, “thecompleted work flaunts its own paradoxically untidy incompleteness”(Gibson, 145). Bruno Clément calls this Beckett’s “rhetoric of ill-saying” (Clément, 1994), arguing that the plethoric signs of narratorialincompetence in Beckett’s fictions – mistakes, corrections, hesitations,retractions, changes of plan and abandoned searches for le mot juste – combine to give the impression of the text as an unfinished draft, inwhich the ending, like the rest of the text, is provisional rather thandefinitive, an end “ faute de mieux” (Clément 1996, 123).

But perhaps the most characteristically “Beckettian” means bywhich Beckett destabilises ending is in the way his texts are perme-ated from start to finish by a rhetoric of ending. Thus Endgame be-gins: “Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly fin-ished” (Beckettt 1958a, 12). Endings, or putative endings, ceaselessly




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interrupt the course of Beckett’s narratives with their falsely dyingcadences. In such texts, which become, in a sense, all ending, the con-clusiveness of the final words is radically undermined: a definitiveend cannot be reached precisely because ends are so continually re-hearsed and unsuccessfully invoked.

The two forms of teleology that characterise Beckett’s narra-tives are also widely familiar: the individual theme of the quest or

journey, and the cosmic theme of entropic decay, the sense of “some-thing […] taking its course” (Beckett 1958a, 17). Sometimes thesethemes are deployed in parallel, most notably in the trilogy, whereMolloy presses on in search of his mother, and Moran in search of Molloy, in the face of advancing physical decrepitude; where both

Malone and the voice of The Unnamable pursue their ill-defined goalsin a world that is inexorably disintegrating.

It is possible to see in Beckett’s later works a progressive un-dermining of these teleologies (although this itself is a teleologicalreading). The theme of the quest becomes simply the theme of walk-ing, without goal, prompted by an inscrutable restlessness: the narrator of From an Abandoned Work says “I have never in my life been onmy way anywhere, but simply on my way” (Beckett 1995, 155-56).So too, the theme of an embodied narrator’s entropic decay is replaced

by a disembodied narration which constructs and dismantles itsimaginary worlds, seemingly not subject to the vicissitudes of the

body, or even the laws of the physical universe (the light and heat

without source in the “cylinder pieces”, for instance).Arguing that Texts for Nothing , with their “wilful shredding of narrative linearity”, represent a turning point in Beckett’s fiction, H.Porter Abbott suggests that the inspiring genre of the Texts is “not thequest but the broad non-narrative category of the meditative personalessay” (Abbott, 107). If narrative is teleological, and requires an end-ing, the essay is inherently speculative, provisional, open-ended:Beckett’s fictions, and their bristling impatience with the conventionsof narrative, can be read, not just as narratives, but as critical essayson narrative itself.

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If Beckett’s narratives subvert the notion of ending, there are manyways in which critical discourse nevertheless constructs Beckett’swork as enacting endings.

Firstly, Beckett’s work is often seen as bringing an end to mod-ernism or modernity. Anthony Cronin’s biography calls Beckett The

Last Modernist , and Richard Begam argues that Beckett’s five novelsfrom Murphy to The Unnamable “provide the earliest and most influ-ential literary expression we have of the ‘end of modernity’” (Begam,3).

Secondly, and as a corollary, Beckett’s work is also read interms of the end of humanism, as contributing towards the “Death of Man”, when, as Michel Foucault writes in The Order of Things, “man

would be erased like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea”(Foucault 1973, 387). To cite just one example of this reading, Gab-riele Schwab describes Beckett’s work as “a philosophical literaturethat explores the condition of the posthuman” (Schwab, 58), with thecylinder of The Lost Ones enacting “the end of the human as we knowit” (Schwab, 60).

Thirdly, another important theme of the end of humanism isthe “death of the author” and the liberation of pure textuality, a projectwhich Beckett’s writing is seen to enact in exemplary fashion. This isevident most notably in Michel Foucault’s use of the line – “Whatmatter who’s speaking, someone said what matter who’s speaking”(Beckett 1995, 109) – as the epigraph to the enormously influential

essay “What is an Author?” (Foucault 1977, 113).A fourth influential reading sees Beckett’s work as enacting theend of narrative as such, or rather, of the kinds of narratives in whichendings are possible. Thus Richard Begam writes of Malone Dies:“Every time the novel takes two steps forward, it takes one step back,and while it doggedly pursues its particular ‘ends’, it never decisivelyachieves them, since one of the things it wants to end is precisely theidea of ‘ends’” (Begam, 125-126).

No doubt there are other “ends” with which Beckett’s work has been associated. However, all the readings outlined above may be broadly classified as poststructuralist, and consist in reading Beckettas a poststructuralist avant la lettre, an uncanny precursor of Barthes,Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze. While the poststructuralist re-readingof Beckett has uncovered deep affinities between Beckett and post-structuralism, what I wish to explore further is the mode of temporal-




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ity which governs these readings, and in particular, their use of a par-ticular rhetorical locution: the “end of”, followed by a more or lessweighty substantive – “modernity”, “humanism”, “the author”, “nar-rative”.

One of the primary aims of poststructuralist criticism is pre-cisely to question the logic of binaries that underpins the historicaldialectic and the theme of revolution, which would posit epochalshifts such as the “end of modernity” as necessary stages in an un-folding teleology. Thus, for instance, Richard Begam is careful not tosuggest that Beckett’s work is a definitive “overcoming” of modern-ism, and in particular of the figures of Joyce and Proust:

Beckett uses these writers […] as points of reference in hisown evolving dialogue with the modernism he seeks toovercome. But that overcoming does not occur – at least notin any ultimate sense – for the pentalogy ‘ends’, in effect, bynot ending (“I can’t go on, I must go on”).

(Begam, 7)

Despite Begam’s precautions, however, it is notoriously difficult toavoid teleological language in making claims for Beckett as an un-canny precursor of poststructuralism. Thus Begam writes in his “Af-terword”:

In taking up these Beckettian pretexts and contexts, in de-veloping them in his own uniquely philosophical and literaryidiom, Derrida carries forward the postmodern project thatBeckett first articulated at the end of World War II.

(Begam, 186)

This notion of a project being carried forward attributes, I think, akind of instrumental teleology to Beckett’s work that is really not

justified within the terms the work sets itself. By contrast, AnthonyUhlmann’s study Beckett and Poststructuralism is careful to situateBeckett, not as a precursor of poststructuralism, but as a contempo-rary, a writer whose intellectual preoccupations arise from historicalconditions shared by the French theorists who came to prominence inthe 1960s.




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Nevertheless, the “rhetoric of ending” continues to permeate poststructuralist readings of Beckett. This is the paradoxical tempo-rality of poststructuralism, littered with “end of…” formulae, butdeeply suspicious of the “rhetoric of overcoming” characteristic of modernism.

In the opening to one of the most influential theories of postmodern-ism, Fredric Jameson claims:

The last few years have been marked by an inverted mille-narianism in which premonitions of the future, catastrophicor redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of

this or that (the end of ideology, art, or social class; the ‘cri-sis’ of Leninism, social democracy, or the welfare state, etc.,etc.); taken together, all of these perhaps constitute what isincreasingly called postmodernism.

(Jameson, 1)

Although Jameson sees postmodernism as a distinct historical epoch,characterised in part by its anti-modernism, he doesn’t see this “senseof an ending” as a positive “revolutionary” moment of rupture withthe past, but as a “crisis in historicity” (Jameson, 25) where teleologyhas failed, where the historical sense has ground to a standstill. So too,Gianni Vattimo writes that postmodernism can be read,

not only as something new in relation to the modern, butalso as a dissolution of the category of the new – in other words, as an experience of ‘the end of history’ – rather thanas the appearance of a different stage of history itself.

(Vattimo, 4)

Postmodernity thus has an ambiguous relation to modernity: being a product of modernity, postmodernity succeeds modernity and thuscontinues modernity’s project of exceeding itself. But as an anti-modernity, postmodernity rejects modernity’s supreme values of in-novation, the historical dialectic and the teleology of the avant-garde.Whereas in modernism the “sense of an ending” was simultaneouslyreplete with the promise of historical recommencement, in postmod-ernism, the “sense of an ending unending” is symptomatic of histori-




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cal paralysis: repetition, stasis, marking time. As I will argue in thesecond part of this essay, there may be more productive ways of thinking about postmodern temporality than the “end of history”model outlined here. First, however, I want to look further at modernand postmodern temporality through an examination of Beckett’sreading of Proust.

Part 2A key text for understanding Beckett’s approach to time, narrative,and the question of endings is his essay on Proust. It is sometimesunderestimated how Beckett’s early essays on Proust and Joyce en-abled him to formulate his own differences from them, even while

paying credit to their achievements in dismantling the conventions of nineteenth-century realism.

The key concept in Beckett’s reading of Proust is the notionof Habit, the self’s defence mechanism against the suffering caused bygenuine perception: Habit is “the guarantee of a dull inviolability, thelightning-conductor of existence” (Beckett 1965, 19). Beckett opposestwo terms – boredom and suffering: the boredom caused by Habit’ssmothering of perception, and the suffering caused by experiences that

pierce this defensive shield, “when for a moment the boredom of liv-ing is replaced by the suffering of being” (Beckett 1965, 19).

If Habit is able to adjust to circumstances, the incursionscaused by the famous Proustian involuntary memory offer painfully

pleasurable glimpses of a reality which the boredom of living habitu-ally obscures: “in its flame it has consumed Habit and all its works,and in its brightness revealed what the mock reality of experiencenever can and never will reveal – the real” (Beckett 1965, 33). Thisawakened perception is explicitly defined by Beckett in terms remi-niscent of Kant’s aesthetics of the beautiful: “The suffering of being:that is, the free play of every faculty” (Beckett 1965, 20).

Beckett distinguishes Proust’s “inspired perception” (Beckett1965, 84) from that of the “classical artist” who “raises himself artifi-cially out of Time in order to give relief to his chronology and causal-ity to his development” (Beckett 1965, 81). However, as Beckett iswell aware, the revelations of Time Regained do, in fact, raise thenarrator “artificially out of Time”: Proust’s “mystical experiencecommunicates an extratemporal essence” (Beckett 1965, 75), recastingthe vast expanse of time elapsed in the Recherche in the retrospective




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glow of boredom and suffering redeemed by the power of art. “TheProustian solution consists […] in the negation of Time and Death, thenegation of Death because the negation of Time. Death is dead be-cause Time is dead. […] Time is not recovered, it is obliterated”(Beckett 1965, 75).

There is a useful discussion of the nature of narrative time inFrank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending . Kermode distinguishes

between two conceptions of time: chronos, which he defines as clock time, passing time, waiting time, “one damn thing after another”(Kermode, 47); and kairos, defined as “a point in time charged withsignificance, charged with a meaning derived from its relation to theend”(Kermode, 47). Kairos is “our way of bundling together percep-

tion of the present, memory of the past, and expectation of the future,in a common organisation” (Kermode, 46). The importance of kairosis, of course, a cornerstone of modernist aesthetics, which valuedBergsonian durée, the vivid, qualitative, subjective experience of livedtime, over quantitative, objective, drearily rationalist “clock time”.Proust’s involuntary memories, like Joyce’s epiphanies or Woolf’s“moments of being”, are the realm of kairos.

But if the modernists sought to discover outcrops of meaningand value in the dull grey sea of passing time, Beckett’s strategy is

just the opposite: instead of transcending chronos by striving to pres-ent an elusive kairos, Beckett strips away the consolations of kairos tomake us perceive the chronos underneath, the passing of time in all its

painful, meaningless dullness. Time in Beckett is not an extratemporalarrangement of significant spots of time, but a relentless sequence of ordinary moments, in which any supposedly transcendent moment of ending, revelation, summation or closure is immediately replaced byanother moment in which it is questioned, undermined, cancelled or forgotten:

It’s the end that is the worst, no it’s the beginning that is theworst, then the middle, then the end, in the end it’s the endthat is the worst, this voice that, I don’t know, it’s every sec-ond that is the worst, it’s a chronicle, the seconds pass, oneafter another, jerkily, no flow, they don’t pass, they arrive,

bang, bang, they bang into you, bounce off, fall and never move again, when you have nothing left to talk about youtalk of time, seconds of time, there are some people add




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them together to make a life, I can’t, each one is the first, nothe second, or the third …

(Beckett 1958b, 151-52)

This is a temporality in which, in the words of Jorge Luis Borges’essay “A New Refutation of Time”, “each moment we live exists, notthe imaginary combination of these moments” (Borges, 322). Or totake another example from Pozzo’s famous speech in Waiting for Godot :

Have you not done tormenting we with your accursed time!It’s abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough

for you, one day like any other day, one day he went dumb,one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day wewere born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same sec-ond, is that not enough for you? (Beckett 1985b, 89)

Thus Frank Kermode writes of Beckett’s temporality: “Time is anendless transition from one condition of misery to another, ‘a passionwithout form or stations’ […]. It is a world crying out for apocalypse;all it gets is vain temporality, mad, multiform antithetical influx”(Kermode, 115).

Jameson associates this “series of pure and unrelated presents intime” (Jameson 27) with postmodernism’s crisis of historicity, and

comments that “some of Beckett’s narratives are […] of this order,most notably Watt , where a primacy of the present sentence in timeruthlessly disintegrates the narrative fabric that attempts to reformaround it” (Jameson, 28). For Jameson, this incapacity or unwilling-ness to make historical sense of the present amounts to an ideologicalrefusal to confront contemporary reality. Jameson’s “epochal” modelof postmodernism stresses its discontinuity, its rupture with modern-ism issuing in a historical impasse. Kermode, on the other hand, un-derlines Beckett’s continuity with the modernism of Proust:

In Proust, whom Beckett so admires, the order, the forms of the passion, all derive from the last book; they are positive.In Beckett, the signs of order and form are more or less con-tinuously presented, but always with a sign of cancellation;they are resources not to be believed in, cheques which will




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bounce. […] But of course it is this order, however ironised,this continuously transmitted idea of order, that makesBeckett’s point.

(Kermode, 115)

Where Jameson dismisses Beckett’s temporality as postmodern nihil-ism, Kermode seeks to rescue Beckett’s “signs of order” as a last-ditchrecovery of a quasi-religious form of continuity. I would like to pro-

pose a different understanding of Beckettian temporality, based on thework of Jean-François Lyotard, that resists both Jameson’s “epochal”model of the end of history, and Kermode’s model of a “continuouslytransmitted idea of order”.

One of the most influential definitions of postmodernity is Jean-François Lyotard’s formulation in The Postmodern Condition, wherehe associates postmodernity with an attitude of “incredulity towardsmeta-narratives” (Lyotard 1984, xxiv). While this aspect of Lyotard’sthesis has been widely influential – the collapse of meta-narrativesleading to postmodernist scepticism about progress, enlightenment,the “unfinished project of modernity” – what is less often remarked ishow Lyotard’s discussion of the postmodern subtly undermines itsown epochal implications, its reading of the postmodern as a succes-sor to modernism.

In The Postmodern Condition Lyotard makes the surprising

claim: “A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern.Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in thenascent state, and this state is constant” (Lyotard 1984, 79). This con-struction of postmodernism as a latency within modernism is at oddswith the epochal implications of the term itself, leading Lyotard later to revisit the concept:

‘Postmodern’ is probably a very bad term because it con-veys the idea of a historical periodization. ‘Periodizing’however, is still a ‘classic’ or ‘modern’ ideal. ‘Postmodern’simply indicates a mood, or better, a state of mind.

(Lyotard 1986-7, 209)

Lyotard’s most notable rethinking of postmodernism is in the essay“Rewriting Modernity”. “Rewriting modernity”, Lyotard argues, is a




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better way of understanding postmodernism because it emphasises theextent to which the postmodern is a work carried out within the termsof modernity:

the postmodern is always implied in the modern because of the fact that modernity, modern temporality, comprises in it-self an impulsion to exceed itself into a state other than it-self. […] Modernity is constitutionally and ceaselessly preg-nant with its postmodernity.

(Lyotard 1991, 25)

Lyotard then goes on to distinguish two models of “re-writing”: “re-

writing” as the revolutionary gesture of wiping the slate clean andstarting the clock again from zero, and the model of “re-writing” asso-ciated with psychoanalysis, Durcharbeitung , or “working through”.Citing Freud, Lyotard further distinguishes between “repetition”, “re-membering” and “working through”. If repetition is a kind of paraly-sis, the symptomatic temporality of the neurotic, the process of “re-membering”, as an Oedipal search for the origin or hidden cause of one’s sufferings, is little better, tending merely to perpetuate the crimerather than putting an end to it (Lyotard 1991, 28).

Instead, Lyotard stresses the value of the concept of Durchar-beitung , of “working through”, arguing that Freud himself abandonsthe ideal of a cure based on a definitive remembering of first causes,

and instead “opens himself […] to the idea that the cure could be,must be, interminable” (Lyotard 1991, 30). Thus, for Lyotard, “con-trary to remembering, working through would be defined as a work without end and therefore without will; without end in the sense inwhich it is not guided by the concept of an end” (Lyotard 1991, 30).

For Lyotard, this is an essentially constructive process, a meansof going on without succumbing to the desire for narrative closure.This model of “working through” seems to me a useful way of think-ing about Beckett’s work, which can be read as a kind of critical “re-writing of modernity” that denies itself the solace of kairos, of anending that would explain, illuminate and redeem Lost Time, that isdedicated, instead, simply to chronos, to putting “one damn thing after another”, to going on.

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Finally, a further distinction can be made between modernist andBeckettian time in terms of Lyotard’s aesthetics of the sublime.

Kant’s definition of the sublime is based on its distinction fromthe beautiful: where the beautiful concerns the form of the object,which consists in its being “bounded”, the sublime is associated withthe formless, with a quality of “unboundedness” (Kant, 265). Theessence of the sublime is its endlessness: it is a vastness that cannot beapprehended all at once by the imagination; instead, the mind mustdraw upon its capacity of reason to comprehend the magnitude of thesublime, a process which involves a mingling of pleasure and dis-

pleasure: a displeasure arising from the failure of the imagination to

grasp the object, and a pleasure arising from the confirmation of “thesuperiority of the rational vocation of our cognitive powers, over thegreatest power of sensibility” (Kant, 269).

In an aesthetic sense, therefore, the sublime is unpresentable: by definition it exceeds both perception and imagination, and can only be intuited by an exercise of rational thought. Lyotard distinguishes between modern and postmodern versions of the sublime. Arguingthat modernism (Proust is one of his examples) is concerned with thetask of enabling the perception “of something which does not allowitself to be made present” (Lyotard 1984, 80), Lyotard argues that, byfiguring the unpresentable as “lost”, the modernist sublime is essen-tially nostalgic:

It allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as themissing contents; but the form, because of its recognisableconsistency, continues to offer to the reader or viewer matter for solace and pleasure. Yet these sentiments do not consti-tute the real sublime sentiment, which is an intrinsic combi-nation of pleasure and pain: the pleasure that reason shouldexceed all presentation, the pain that imagination or sensi-

bility should not be equal to the concept.(Lyotard 1984, 81)

The Beckettian sublime, I would argue, inheres in its evocation of chronos. It is impossible for us to perceive the infinity of passingtime; it is only by an effort of rational thought that we can compre-hend even small magnitudes of elapsed time, such as the span of a




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human life. Thus Beckett’s characters are always trying to calculatethe number of minutes they have been alive, or the number of stepsthey have taken in a lifetime of aimless wandering, or the number of times they have encircled the earth.

But the sublime also requires a painful sensation that alerts thesenses to their incapacity to apprehend its immensity. To give just oneexample, one of my favourite passages in Waiting for Godot has al-ways been the exchange between Vladimir and Estragon after thedeparture of Pozzo and Lucky:

VLADIMIR : That passed the time.ESTRAGON: It would have passed in any case.

VLADIMIR : Yes, but not so rapidly.(Beckett 1985b, 48)

For a long time this last line irritated me. It seemed to rescue a har-rowing perception of the indifference of chronos, of a time that“would have passed in any case”, with the platitudinous consolationsof kairos (“time flies when you’re having fun”). Many years later Irealised that, in the context of Beckett’s theatre, the last line – “Yes,

but not so rapidly” – might be taken ironically. With its agonisingtemporality of waiting, its wearying pauses, and the sputtering ex-haustion of its dialogue, the theatrical time of Waiting for Godot has

been slowed down to the tempo of chronos: rather than it passing the

time, time just passes, at the rate of exactly one second per second.Thus Beckett can be seen as rewriting the temporality of mod-ernism, but with all the “modernity” taken out. Time is deprived of thevalues that belong to kairos: meaningfulness, transcendence, a specificrelation to origins and ends. Stripped back to chronos, to isolated sec-onds of “one damn thing after another”, time is not obliterated, it isrevealed.




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1985). (1985a) –, Waiting for Godot (London: Faber & Faber, 1985). (1985b) –, The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York:

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Samuel Beckett)”, in Genèses des fins: de Balzac à Beckett, de Michelet à Ponge, ed. Claude Duchet and Isabelle Tournier (Paris:

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