Beckett’s aesthetics of failure: language as an incompetent tool for self-expression.

That Samuel Beckett was an author acutely concerned with language and the limits of

its expressive power, emanates not only in the way speech is composed in his dramatic

works, but through other records of his literary career. In a 1929 publication ‘Dante…Bruno.

Vico…Joyce’, where he assumes the role of a literary critic, Beckett puts forward an idea that

language of the day needs to be alive, rather than remain to be ‘polite contortions of 20 th

century literature’ (14). In his review of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake Beckett is inspired by the

way content and form achieve unity in Joyce’s language. Recounting the evolution of poetic

language into a language of abstractions, Beckett understands that to bring language to a new,

which implies old, evolutionary step, a certain process of un-doing or “un-language-ing”

must take place.

Beckett’s awareness of language and its expressive quality is amalgamated into

contorted, often confusing, cycles of speech in his dramatic works. Speech has representative,

rather than expressive qualities in Beckett’s drama (Iser 252). What it usually represents is

alienation from sense and meaning, and is achieved through repetition, lack of punctuation,

ellipsis and counterpoint of solipsism to the verbal expressions of the characters. Early

critique of Beckett’s dramatic language ponders that speech, in most of his plays, have

neither expressive nor communicative qualities (Iser 251). What is expressed in dialogues is

‘accelerating change of subjects, which follow swiftly upon each other’ (Iser 253). This

pattern of acceleration and non-sense takes its full form in Not I, a play where the audiences

witness vomit of words from a dimly lit Mouth on the stage. Beckett intended the words of

the play to be spoken ‘like water from the mouth of a stone lion in a fountain’ (Furlani 94).

This tactic of expression inspires a sense of automation and an absence of a hearer. Thus,

resembling an Inner/Private version of language that individuals reserve for self-inspection

and revelation. No introspection, however, is achieved in Not I. Here, the words represent

distilled memories and repetitions of those memories. The aggravated repetition signifies that

it is impossible to overcome the structures imposed by language. While the recursive quality

of language may inspire a false premise, that anything of essence and substance can ever be

expressed, the grip of conventionalized and generalized meanings reign against expressing of

the essentials.

In his Critique of Language Firtz Mauthner, a language philosopher who Beckett read

extensively, expresses an almost nihilistic mistrust towards language as a vehicle of

expression. Rather, he ascribes to it a social and sense-embedded quality in which a private

grip on meaning is ‘the most worthless in the stock market of human intercourse’. Even when

the private grip on one’s situation is expressed, it will often be the case in Beckett’s drama,

that this makes the characters feel and remain isolated. ‘A few simple words…from my

heart…and I am all alone… once more…’ Mrs Rooney muses in All that Fall (Beckett 183).

There is no understanding of her language, outside of herself. Her musings so private, the

relation of her sensations to words so uninteresting to anyone else, Mrs. Rooney often gets

ignored or left once she starts going off in her monologues. The heart-breaking factor in this

is that she has a hint of this ‘condition’: ‘I use none but the simplest words, I hope, and yet

sometimes find my way of speaking very…bizarre’ (Beckett 175). Her social language is

hindered by the uncertainty of her own private meaning. Disorganized speech which is

spoken to no one, and thus, to herself, consist of leftover structures and vacuous meanings

that have been lost to memory. This is precisely the kind of language that Mauthner denotes

as ‘untransferable, incomprehensible and unsharable’. (qtd. In Ben-Zvi. 194) Thus, she is

always halting, stopping to look around and describe things – to try to exorcise the private

language in her monologues. Private language, by which she hopes to express herself is

doomed to endless, descriptive iterations that plague the language of every lived life.
 Same thought bellies a key passage from Beckett’s Three Dialogues: ‘the expression

that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to

express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.’

(qtd. in Furlani 34). Here, Beckett admits to an axiomatic nature of artistic expression and

obeys an artist’s obligation to express, even though there is nothing to express and no reliable

tool to express it with. The admission to the fact that language, his primary mode of

expression, is a futile and incompetent tool is a constant presence felt as speech disintegrates

into seemingly nonsensical cycles of repetition. Speech is largely restless in Beckett’s drama.

It seeks to annul itself, but fails to do so. Beckett writes to exhaust the verbal premises of the

self, who seeks to express itself with a tool which is impractical for such an endeavour. And

perhaps achieve an expression of Nothing once, and if, the exhaustion of self is successful.

However, as language is a recursive tool, it never quite exhausts itself. Beckett’s obedience to

his own axiomatic, self-consuming logic is brought forth by the characters’ inability to stay

silent, even though their speech brings them further away from sense-making (Furlani 37).

Confusion prevails, and coherent thought is tramped upon as a social aspect of language that

Beckett wants to transfix in order to get himself to express ‘nothing’. Beckett’s characters

resist silence in hopes that attaining a verbal form of what they are feeling will liberate them

from the confusion they’re lost in. However, confusion is a condition through which

nothingness manifests. Disorganized syntactic patterns make it impossible for the characters

to attain this cathartic state, and thus they are perpetually bound to and by their words.

To advance in the play, the characters need to speak through their awareness that the

words fail them. Here language passes time and also deters it in a way of ‘chaining the

characters to the language of the moment’ as Mauthner put it (qt. In Ben-Zvi 187). In

following the rules of language, it is impossible to escape a commitment to a defined truth

value of a word. This requires further elaborations and invites ambiguity into the language.
 What results, is the inactivity of characters that is contrasted with their ceaseless linguistic

activity; as well as an affirmation that no absolutes exist, let alone an absolute that can be

reached through the rigid language required to explain either external or internal phenomena.

Works Cited

Beckett, Samuel. “Dante...Bruno. Vico...Joyce.”, 1929.

Beckett, Samuel. The Complete Dramatic Works. London, Faber And Faber, 1986. Cited as

“Beckett”

Ben-Zvi, Linda. “Samuel Beckett, Fritz Mauthner, and the Limits of Language.” PMLA/Publications

of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. 95, no. 2, Mar. 1980, pp. 183–200,

10.2307/462014. Accessed 10 Mar. 2021.

Furlani, Andre. Beckett after Wittgenstein. Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University Press, 2015.

Iser, Wolfgang. “Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Language.” Modern Drama, vol. 9, no. 3, 1996, pp.

251–259, 10.1353/mdr.1966.0061.