Beckett’s Poetry

Faber and Faber published a new volume of it last year. Don’t call it minor:

But Beckett didn’t do minor. Or rather, and this was more and more true as his work went on, he was concerned to undo the distinction between major and minor: consider merely the titles of some later works: Texts for Nothing, Fizzles, Residua. Not to mention the fact that he’d reached his Endgame by 1957. In poetry, he’d already attained this almost-disappeared state some time before. An untitled French poem of the late 30s speaks of “des loques de chanson”—tatters of song. With Beckett, the leftovers are the meal. That might not be so problematic, considering that the work-as-fragment had been conceivable since Romanticism—except that in a manner even more radical than in his fiction or theater, Beckett’s poetry is distinctly and seemingly irreducibly strange and idiosyncratic. Alain Badiou could credibly claim to read a late Beckett prose work like Worstward Ho “as a short philosophical treatise, as a treatment in shorthand of the question of being,” which is to say, it might make sense to understand it in terms of an implicit claim to universality. By contrast, Beckett’s poems, early and late, do everything possible to undermine any possible universalization, and instead keep their own discourse mired in an individuality that is always trivial: thus, the Descartes ventriloquized in “Whoroscope” is concerned not with pure thought but with the egg he intends to eat, for as Beckett’s note informs us, he “liked his omelette made of eggs hatched”—he presumably means “laid”—“from eight to ten days; shorter or longer under the hen and the result, he says, is disgusting.” Beckett must have liked to sit on his texts for shorter or longer, for he is a connoisseur of disgust.