[In the following essay, Butler examines deconstructive elements in several plays by Beckett, suggesting that in them Beckett attempts to “escape … from the tyranny of the signifier.”]

Beckett is the poet of the poststructuralist age. In his plays, as in all his work, we are offered something like a version of the world according to Derrida. Where Beckett has already given up the search for determinable meaning, in the 1940s and 1950s, as a vain pursuit, poststructuralism would proclaim, in the 1960s and 1970s, the ultimately undecidable nature of meaning, and would celebrate meaninglessness as an objective correlative for a new vision of the world.

Beckett started as a Modernist, offering in the poem Whoroscope, of 1929, and in the stories More Pricks Than Kicks, of 1934, formalistic constructs in the manner of Joyce which, though socially anarchic, operate according to the Joycean equation of world-order to word-order. He did not seem able to find his voice as a playwright before the Second World War, although he had dabbled, as a student and later, in dramatic experiments. His parody of Corneille's Le Cid, entitled Le Kid, written in collaboration with the French lecteur at Trinity College Dublin, Georges Pelorson, was performed in 1931, while, according to Ruby Cohn, a single scene of a play about Dr Johnson, Human Wishes, was completed in 1937 (and is published in Disjecta of 1983).

By 1945 Beckett had also written the two novels, Murphy (1938) and Watt (1945). These strain the Modernist project to breaking point, Watt, in particular, developing a style of presentation of language that becomes opaque, even insane. Reading Watt, the literary experiments of William Burroughs come to mind, and we should also remember that Beckett was soon to form part of the group (if he ever formed part of any group) around the publisher Jerome Lindon, whose Éditions de Minuit published the ‘nouveau roman’ of Robbé-Grillet, Pinget, Duras and others in the 1950s as well as Beckett's own novels.

Then, from about 1947, Beckett began to find his own voice, to see his own vision most clearly and to write it most forcefully. Interestingly, he claimed that the idea that enabled him to make this breakthrough was connected with the word ‘monologue’. During the six years after 1947 he produced his trilogy of novels, Molly, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, and his most famous and influential play, Waiting for Godot (written probably in 1948-9). This great period of activity can be seen as continuing through Endgame (written in 1956) and on to the novel How It Is (written in 1960) and the play Happy Days of 1961. Which means that the ‘classic’ Beckett texts belong to the first half of his writing career, 1934-61, while the remainder of his texts (I choose the word ‘remainder’ with some care) take up the second half of his active life as a writer, 1961-89. This splitting of his career, although somewhat arbitrary, applies to his plays as much as to his novels and it suggests that we consider Godot (first performed in 1953), Endgame (1956), the radio play All That Fall (1957), Krapp's Last Tape (1958), Happy Days (1961) and perhaps Play (1963) as ‘classic’ Beckett, while seeing as ‘residual’ the plethora of shorter dramatic pieces, including a few that came as chips off the block (what the French call déchets d'atelier) during the great creative period.

These shorter plays, sometimes called ‘dramaticules’ by Beckett, include, contemporaneously with the major pieces, the two Acts Without Words, Embers, Words and Music and Cascando; then, subsequently, Come and Go, Eh Joe, Breath, Not I, That Time, Footfalls; and the latest pieces, including the television plays, Ghost Trio and … but the clouds …, and a partial reversion to an earlier manner, Catastrophe. This is not an exhaustive list (which is best found in, for example, the Faber Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett or, indeed, Faber's Complete Plays of Samuel Beckett) but it offers a map of Beckett's career as a dramatist that is reasonably accurate.

I have foregrounded the two terms ‘remainder’ and ‘residual’ in listing the later plays. In doing so I am partly following Beckett's own usage; among the titles he used for his collections of later texts (he produced a considerable number of non-dramatic texts as well as plays) we find Fizzles and Disjecta and a collection subtitled Other Residua. He answered a query of Brian Finney's about the word ‘residua’ with the gloss that texts following How It Is were to be considered residual, ‘(1) Severally, even when that does not appear of which each is all that remains and, (2) In relation to whole body of previous work.’¹ Clearly he sees these pieces as supplementary to a main body or corpus of work already accomplished, and, at first blush, one might well ask how on earth we would approach this later work, much of it ‘difficult’, if we did not know that it came from the pen of Samuel Beckett. Would such utterly static pieces of theatre as Ohio Impromptu or A Piece of Monologue ever have seen the light of international production, for instance, if they had come from an unknown? They are extraordinarily effective pieces of theatre but their minimalism sends the reader or audience back to the relatively more solid ground of the ‘classic’ work. They are the last few building blocks of the house that Beckett deconstructed for so long but could never finally abandon.

Yet, if the later work is rendered comprehensible by the earlier, it can equally well be claimed that the earlier work is illuminated and, as it were, confirmed by the later. We do not perhaps know how to read Godot until we have read, or rather seen, Quad, nor Endgame until we have seen That Time. That is the first proposal I have to make for reading Beckett's plays, that we should allow them to bounce off one another in both directions, imagining perhaps a circular, even centripetal, motion in Beckett's mind, round and round the same obsessive topics, refining on but never escaping from his ‘pensum’, churning again and again his ‘whey of words’.

Besides this dialectic between ‘the essential works of the canon’, as John Fletcher calls them, and the ‘residua’, another dialectic can be established between the plays and the novels. Here again there is a circularity rather than a hierarchy, but a useful first move might be to see the plays as simpler or more schematic versions of the material of the fiction. Beckett himself said something to this effect with reference to a production of Endgame: ‘Theater ist für mich zunächst eine Erholung von der Arbeit am Roman. Man hat es mit einen bestimmten Raum zu tun und mit Menschen in diesem Raum’, that is, that theatre is for him a ‘relief from working on novels’; in the theatre you have to work ‘with a definite space and with people in this space.’² The illimitable freedom of the blank page where the ‘wordy-gurdy’ of the novelist churns away (‘Where now? Who now? When now?’, as Beckett asks of the first page of The Unnamable), is replaced by the discipline of the set, the stage, ‘the Board’ as Pozzo calls it, and by the limits of the human figures on it: one man, one woman, two men … four at most at any one time. Compared with the novel, theatre is a minimalist art.

The plays can thus be seen as parables, shorter and perhaps pithier versions of what has been claborated in the fiction. But, once again, although this has an explanatory power, it is as well to canvass the opposite possibility too, for if the plays are a concise version of longer texts it may be that they contain the quintessential features of the novels. An example here might be the stunning monologue, Not I, of 1973, which reproduces in miniature something of the essence of many earlier monologues, especially perhaps the cascade of words that constitutes the second half of The Unnamable. Although this seems to put Not I into the junior position, one might want to use that play to help one understand the nature of the Unnamable's voice and the orientation of his concerns. Equally, the shortest of all Beckett's plays, Breath, of 1969, contains in its thirty seconds' duration a concrete parable that illustrates the many places in Beckett where the dual nature of time is explored, from More Pricks Than Kicks to Godot (here a residual play illuminates a classic play) and the trilogy.

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Having had a ‘little canter’ around these ways of seeing Beckett's plays in relation to each other and to his novels, we come face to face with their enigmatic presence. What are we to make of them?

They are, first and foremost, no freer than any other cultural objects from the historical moment in which they were produced. They are situated at a particular point in the ‘general text’ of twentieth-century culture and speak the language of their environment. Thus the ‘problem’ of meaninglessness has been prioritised in intellectual discourse at least since the First World War (Beckett was born in 1906), and since the 1920s writers have had, as a possible model solution, the aestheticist escape: the function of art for Proust and Joyce in the 1920s (and for Joyce until his death in 1941) was not to give meaning to reality but to be a reality in itself. A la recherche du temps perdu and Finnegans Wake offer substitute realities, not explanations of what Beckett would call ‘this one’. Beckett himself, writing of Joyce's magnum opus in 1929, when it was still called Work in Progress, pointed out that Finnegans Wake ‘is not about something; it is that something itself.’³ The incipient word-mountains that are Beckett's early texts, as well as his essay on Joyce from which this quotation comes, testify to his temptation to take this path, but by the time of the trilogy at least, he was also aware of the alternative pull towards silence, something unthinkable to his mentors. (The word ‘mentor’ is justified by Beckett's essay on Joyce, by their friendship in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s and by Beckett's most spectacular piece of criticism, the essay on Proust of 1931.)

Beckett shows signs of having been aware of many of the various strands of the reaction to meaninglessness both from the twentieth century and earlier: Buddhism, Cartesian doubt, Surrealism, Existentialism.⁴ His statements about the classic topics of nihilism are surprisingly open, ranging from the first line of Godot (‘Nothing to be done’) to the poem that is printed among the notes at the end of Watt, which includes the query, ‘Who may … Nothingness in words enclose?’

This directness has encouraged Beckett criticism to start from the assumption that it is with ‘nothingness’ that it has to do, and that its task is to account for the meaning that emerges from this insistence on meaninglessness. This essay is no exception, for it now seems to me that Beckett, as much in his plays as in his fiction, is best seen as offering an artistic version of the most recent philosophical expression of the void, poststructuralist relativism.

We can take, as itself a ‘classic’ text of this style of thinking, Derrida's essay ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’ of 1966.⁵ It is in the opening pages of this text that Derrida launches his attack on the ‘centre’ and on metaphysics in general, in an effort to give full value to the Structuralist enterprise on which he is commenting in the essay (notably on the anthropology of Lévi-Strauss). He wants to draw the necessary inferences from the new realisation of ‘the structurality of structure’ and these include, notably, the abandoning of the notion of the centre as the ground of explanation. Until the Structuralist revolution, according to Derrida, Western thought substituted one centre for another; committed to the notion of some invariable presence, it has filled this notion with names: essence, existence, substance, subject, truth, the transcendent, consciousness, God, man … the list of ‘fundamentals’ could be extended. Since Structuralism, however, we have not been able to find another satisfying ‘metonymy’ of this sort and have been left in a wilderness without centre.

This ‘decentring’ of our possibilities of thought, with its roots in Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger, reaches its limit, as is well known, in Derrida's own work. He points out that no discourse can operate in a vacuum, hence the fact that his deconstruction of metaphysics will employ the vocabulary of metaphysics, but, in the end, his discourse tends to be a radical undermining of any possibility of stable meaning within discourse.

Here, rather than in the impossible silence, is surely the Sisyphean quarry where Samuel Beckett has been working too. The quarry is the world of signifies (words upon words), floating unanchored to the signifieds that would produce a centre to guarantee their meaning; the problem is illustrated by the enigmatic picture in Erskine's room, in Watt (‘a circle and a centre not its centre in search of a centre and its circle respectively’).⁶ Yet, as for Derrida, there is no alternative to words, and to speak, even of escape, is to speak in the words that are given to us. As Clov tells Hamm, in Endgame, ‘I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent.’ The impossible silence shimmers behind Beckett's texts like a mystical mirage of an impossible completion—meanwhile we are in words, up to our necks in words like Winnie in the sand in Happy Days.

The silence would be the transcendental signified, the meaning that needs no mediation by signifiers to express itself; God, presence, the plenitude of being, eternity, the truth. Precisely, in fact, those metaphysical entities whose radical impossibility it has been Derrida's self-appointed task to demonstrate. We live in the alphabetic world that never begins or ends, while God would be, as has been claimed for him, Alpha and Omega. Origins and ends are what there is not for poststructuralism—as Derrida puts it, the concept of structure has done away with concepts of arché and telos—beginning and end.

Here, surely, is the philosophical analogue for Beckett's plays. What made Godot so stunning and so difficult for its first audiences was just the unfamiliarity of this style of thinking. Why can't Didi and Gogo remember their origins? Why is it impossible to predict for them an end that would be an end? Why, in the play, does ‘nothing happen twice’? There is a possible negative theology available in this—the encounter with Godot is, since he manifests his presence by non-presence, an encounter with nothingness. But we need not become too dewy-eyed at this apparent reintroduction of the divine under a thick veil—the nothingis nothing—Godot does not come indeed. Yet we are here for all that, we are, as Heidegger would say, ‘always already’ in situation, always already with a past.

And Endgame is the play that starts with the word ‘finished’ and ends with the word ‘remain’, presenting us with a joke on arché and telos. It is the play that tries again and again to reach an end, that insists on its own last gasp but that approaches that gasp in an infinitely deferred asymptotic curve.

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A good place to start when studying Beckett's drama is with the two mimes, Act Without Words I and II. The first of these shows us Heideggerian man ‘thrown into being’ and his attempts to understand the semiotic world in which he finds himself:

Desert. Dazzling light.
The man is flung backwards on stage from right wing. He falls, gets up immediately, dusts himself, turns aside, reflects.

Reflection is not what prompts his next move—the world is already set up for it—a whistle summons him:

Whistle from right wing.
He reflects, goes out right.
Immediately flung back on stage he falls, gets up immediately, dusts himself, turns aside, reflects.

The laws are already in place, the system of rewards and punishments—what Lacan would call the tyranny of the signifier—is immediately operational, the individual does not create his own world. On the contrary, he responds to signs, signals, signifiers within it, looking for meanings that are constantly offered and just as constantly withdrawn from him:

A tiny carafe, to which is attached a huge label inscribed WATER, descends from flies …
He looks up, sees carafe, reflects, gets up, goes and stands under it, tries in vain to reach it, renounces …

The renunciation of meaning is quite explicitly suggested in this parable of human frustration; the carafe offers the water of grace, of baptism, of salvation, but, in the intellectual context within which Beckett wrote this image, must itself give way to notions of explanation—the divine would explain what Beckett has called ‘the mess’.

Derrida has called the structuralist revolution the ‘moment when language invaded the universal problematic’⁷ and this is the invasion that Beckett, too, will undergo. In the novels the ‘wordy-gurdy’ ploughs on, unable ever to ‘get it all said’, unable ever to ‘say the word that will be me’. In the plays with words the same process is apparent: Lucky's speech, in Godot, is a parody of a lecture that offers an explanation of the decline of the human species; it has to be silenced. Hamm's stories, in Endgame, are transparent inventions designed to pass the time. The trouble is in the words; Clov hints that ‘they don't mean anything any more’. People, too, are merely signifiers, representatives rather than originals, as Vladimir puts it when the tramps are considering whether to help up the fallen Pozzo: ‘It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better.’ When, a few lines later, he boasts that they have kept their appointment (with Godot) and asks, ‘How many people can boast as much?’ Estragon answers, ‘Billions.’

Unoriginal, then, and decentred, mankind becomes analogous to the signifiers of Structuralism themselves, that is, detached from the sort of properly-grounded meaning that Western thinking has always sought. In one of his questions to Clov, Hamm puts the point farcically: ‘We're not beginning to … to … mean something?’ And Clov answers: ‘Mean something! You and I, mean something! (Brief laugh.) Ah that's a good one!’

Our meaninglessness is in part caused by the routine with which we deaden our everyday lives. As Clov asks, ‘Why this farce, day after day?’ It was a theme that concerned Beckett as early as the essay on Proust which mentions, among much else, the Proustian attempt to get beyond the habitual. This Existentialist thesis is apparent in the second Act Without Words, which works by the simple method of having a ‘goad’ prod into life two men sleeping in sacks on the stage. Each in turn gets out of his sack at the behest of the goad, dresses and generally prepares himself for the day, moves the sacks, undresses and crawls into his sack to sleep. Routine could be no more forcefully or claustrophobically conveyed.

What is to be done under these gloomy circumstances? Of course, and famously, ‘nothing’ is to be done, but, as the tramps in Godot might say, what are we to do while we are doing nothing? What, in other words, did Beckett find to pass the time with or, to put it another way, to fill the page or the stage with? The answer supplied by a reading of Derrida would be ‘bricolage’. Taking his cue from the Structuralist, Gerard Genette, he develops Lévi-Strauss's concept of the ‘makeshift’ and extends it to all writing in the following manner. The bricoleur, in Lévi-Strauss, is someone who uses the means which happen to be at his disposal to complete a project, who employs what is readily available rather than the tools specifically intended for the job. By trial and error, combination and adaptation, he finds the way to use his material; as Genette says, this analysis of ‘bricolage’ could be applied to criticism, including literary criticism, for there is, according to Derrida, a ‘necessity of borrowing one's concepts from the text of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined’ so that now ‘every discourse is bricoleur’.⁸

What Derrida has in mind here is the relationship of discourses to their predecessors. Just as, in deconstructing metaphysics, one must employ the vocabulary of metaphysics, so, in putting together any text, one must employ the given vocabulary (construed in its broadest sense) of other available texts. Otherwise one becomes an ‘engineer’—the one who ‘constructs the totality of his language, syntax, and lexicon’ thus becoming ‘a subject who supposedly would be the absolute origin of his own discourse and supposedly would construct it “out of nothing”’.⁹

In all this there is a way of understanding Beckett. He is playing among the ruins of the culture to which he had so impassioned an attachment as a young man. At first there were signs that he would follow Joyce in the attempt to engineer a new discourse and construct a totality of language within which he could be god, but instead he opted for the via negativa that leads towards the silence. This did not prove an easy passage—Godot tries to become the play in which the pause (the silence) works as powerfully as the words, and Endgame tries to create the impression that there is almost nothing left to do or say; it makes, in fact, an immense effort to end. These efforts, however, are only able to be made in, and with, the ruinous material of Western culture. The plays are, in the end, plays, artistic constructs that have their own shape. Didi and Gogo come as close as it is possible to do to being nothing. But there is no silence, there is no play that is not a play, there is no final possibility of ‘being nothing’. The only material ready to hand for the expression, even of the void, is the material of our culture. Thus, Lucky does not babble, he gives a lecture; Hamm's stories, though transparently mendacious, rely on a shared culture of giving and receiving; Didi and Gogo are, if not clearly French, Irish, English or Russian, at least definitely not Chinese, or men from Mars.

Thus Beckett performs his bricolage among the ruins. The ruins are the remains of his reading in Dante, in Descartes, in Shakespeare and in the Existentialists. He may appear to try to jettison them but, in the end, he plays with them instead of, as Hamm would say, ‘discarding’. As his work went on, I have suggested, he also played among the ruins of his own texts, thereby adding a new dimension to intertextual bricolage.

In the major plays, Beckett's exercising of his material in this sense is quite easy to spot and is responsible for the odd tone of Godot and Endgame, which are, as the subtitle to the former indicates, ‘tragi-comedies’. The tragic side of the equation is structural—the tramps are lonely and abandoned, the play takes them nowhere, and almost the same words could be applied to Hamm and Clov, not to mention Nagg and Nell—but the comic side is permitted, in the face of this, by Beckett's bricoleur nature as a writer. For what is funny, in Godot and Endgame, are the moments of explicit reference to the models that the plays mock. It is as if Beckett says to us, ‘Look! Here's the Christian religion, here's Charlie Chaplin, here's a soliloquy, here's an aside, here's Shakespeare (“My kingdom for a nightman!”), here's Bishop Berkeley, here are people also serving although they are only standing and waiting …’ But none of this can, in the absymal contexts in which it is found, be taken seriously. The bits and pieces aren't the right tools for the job, they are out-of-joint, ineffective, rendered laughable. Beckett has, in other words, disclaimed all qualifications as an engineer, and the provisional or makeshift nature of the positions he adopts is intensely clear, especially in the plays where, after all, some words must be spoken, even by Lucky. Thus, the Biblical references that figure so largely in the opening pages of Godot are, simultaneously, comic in their obvious and hopeless derivativeness from a discourse that doesn't work, and tragic for precisely the same reason.

VLADIMIR:
One of the thieves was saved. (Pause.) It's a reasonable percentage …
Ah yes, the two thieves. Do your remember the story?
ESTRAGON:
No.
VLADIMIR:
Shall I tell it to you?
ESTRAGON:
No.

Why does Estragon refuse to hear the story (which Vladimir, after a fashion, tells none the less)? Is the reason not connected with their agreement that ‘hope deferred maketh the something sick’? Estragon cannot abide the promise of promise, the tantalising nature of what might be. It is Vladimir, in Act Two, who, optimistic as ever, greets the second arrival of Pozzo and Lucky with the cry ‘It's Godot! We're saved!’, thereby echoing the discussion of the Saviour in the early pages.

The Dead Sea, which seems to be most of what Estragon remembers of his reading of the Gospels, is a joke because we feel that there is perhaps more that could be remembered in those texts, and because, in his ignorance, he found the look of it make him thirsty, when it is known to be violently saline. But we are not allowed to stop at the joke. The truth is that there is something pathetic, even tragic, in Estragon's nostalgia for what he has never known (‘We'll swim. We'll be happy.’). The Gospels do offer drink to the thirsty, salvation for the lost and so on, and the tramps do need it, there is no cosy alternative to their present plight which we could flatter ourselves that they might be able to retreat to once tired of waiting for Godot.

Similarly, every instant of Endgame is made up of the makeshift. Hamm is an actor, his stories are false, his attitudes absurd; yet they are the available ones, these are the parts assigned to us, vague memories of dramatic moments elsewhere and at another time. So much so that it is never fully possible to know when Hamm is ‘putting it on’ or when he is ‘serious’. What value can we attach to his cries of despair (or to Pozzo's great outburst, ‘Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time?’, in the second act of Godot) when we know that the language and the structures used are inappropriate, being the words of our culture and not of ‘ourselves’? The last of the ‘classic’ Beckett plays, in my account, is entitled Play. In all his work there is this playing with the serious that undermines it intellectually without ridding it of its emotional seriousness.

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I have concentrated, in what I have said so far, on the two best-known of Beckett's plays, Godot and Endgame. I think it is now possible to see his dramatic work as being all of a piece in some respects, with Beckett territory mapped out in these plays, together with Krapp, All That Fall and perhaps Play, and to see the later work acting as a series of refinements within this arid zone. But I also see some of the later work as achieving the quality and intensity of the great plays and, perhaps, even as advancing their arguments a little.

The word ‘arguments’ is perhaps wrong here, because the plays I have in mind do not necessarily appeal to the intellect. The Derridean echoes in the earlier work give place to a level that can best be described as emotional, in such works as Not I, Footfalls and Rockaby. It is perhaps no coincidence that these plays focus on a female protagonist (in all three cases created to Beckett's taste by Billie Whitelaw) and permitted the older Beckett to put onto the stage the slightly richer vision that the female could evoke in him at times. (We can think of Celia, in Murphy, or the three women who people the short piece, of 1966, Come and Go.) These three plays have been called ‘Beckett's other trilogy’ by Robert Simone,¹⁰ and, although that is almost certainly an exaggeration of their status, they are remarkably powerful pieces with a certain continuity evident between them. I would like to close with a consideration of their significance for our overall estimation of Beckett the playwright, while signalling that I believe that, among the later plays, they should be read or seen alongside Quad, That Time and the television plays, Ghost Trio and … but the clouds …, as the essential corpus of Beckett's dramatic work of the 1970s and 1980s.

The richer vision of Not I (1973), in spite of the female protagonist, is hardly softer than the bleak pictures of the earlier theatre. Indeed, the humour that pervades Godot, Krapp and the other ‘classic’ pieces is conspicuously absent from this terrifying and hysterical monologue. I have not seen any stronger audience reactions than those experienced during and after a good performance of this play which, after all, only lasts ten minutes. But that seems to be the point—reaction is at a terrified level of powerful feeling and not a matter of ratiocination. It is as if Beckett has reached a tone or a picture¹¹ where the mental can be abandoned in favour of the visceral. Certainly, when Mouth emits her appalling screams at the stated intervals during her babble, the effect is of listening to pure human suffering, in the knowledge that nothing in the words spoken will account for or justify it. While working on the play, he wrote in a letter to Jessica Tandy that he was ‘not unduly concerned with intelligibility’ and that he hoped that his piece would work ‘on the nerves of the audience, not on its intellect’.¹²

Footfalls (1976) picks up the theme of female memory in a slightly softer mode. There is a confusion between ‘V’, the voice of the mother, that listens, and then talks, and ‘M’, the voice of May, the protagonist, whose footfalls we hear and who also talks. Each has her monologue, each seems to revolve in her mind events that took place in the past, memory is stirred by the pacing feet in the grey light. Once again it is not at all clear that we should attach much significance to what is said. Instead, the archetypal figure walks, her mother's voice sounds, perhaps in her head, and the impact is on the nerves rather than the thought processes.

Rockaby (1982) is another, softer version of Not I. We hear the voice speaking while the actress rocks silently except for four commands to the voice (‘More’). We hear, slowly and repetitiously, what is passing in her head, but the thoughts are more impressions than thoughts and they circle around a few images so that we are able to identify a tone to go with the stage picture, an elegiac tone suitable to the entirely obvious fact that the old woman in the rocker, in black, is dying. There is an immense simplicity about the piece: the old woman sits, rocks, remembers, fades, dies. A few memories flit compulsively across the screen of memory, mark the life they are the epitaph to with their melancholy mood, fade, die. That is all.

It is easy to speak of the theatre of these late plays, and Footfalls has been seen by Martin Esslin as almost a new art form, while all three represent a new kind of drama,¹³ but they seem far less amenable to any coherent interpretation, as texts, unless it be by a criticism that is insistently deconstructionist. Then, however, one feels that it would be the critic not so much deconstructing Beckett as merely pointing out the extent to which Beckett deconstructs the norms of Western theatre and, interestingly, himself. For the slightly softened memories of Footfalls and Rockaby are the work of an old man, himself remembering, and they provide alter egos in which Beckett can survey the past with a certain calm. In this respect the ‘trilogy’ would work as follows: Not I is the last hysterical gasp, after which we meet the woman again, calmer each time, finally surveying from the trivial Olympus of a rocking chair the unmeaning shards of a life remembered. It is the world without telos, but without a meaningful origin either.

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In the end there seems no net in which to catch Beckett's theatre, although currently, along with his non-dramatic work, it seems to provoke the making of nets innumerable. The closest one comes to a catch is when one is wearing quite definitely poststructuralist spectacles. Made from the discourses of the past (our past, Beckett's own version of that past), his last plays became simpler and less inclined to try to assert their own discourses, the words have become emptier, sparer, more enigmatic, and the tendency has been towards the creation of a form of picture that can at least pretend to have escaped from the tyranny of the signifier.

Notes

1. Brian Finney, Since How It Is: A Study of Samuel Beckett's Later Fiction (London: Covent Garden Press, 1972) p. 10.

2. See Michael Haerdter, Materialen zu Becketts Endspiel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1967) p. 88.

3. This essay is now collected in Ruby Cohn (ed.), Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment by Samuel Beckett (London: John Calder, 1983) pp. 19-34.

4. See, for instance, David Hesla, The Shape of Chaos: An Interpretation of the Art of Samuel Beckett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), and Lance St John Butler, Samuel Beckett and the Meaning of Being: A Study in Ontological Parable (London: Macmillan, 1984).

5. Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, was delivered as a lecture at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA, in French in October 1966. It is available in English in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978) pp. 278-93.

6. Samuel Beckett, Watt (London: John Calder, 1963) p. 127.

7. Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play’, p. 124.

8. Ibid., p. 129.

9. Ibid.

10. R. Thomas Simone, ‘Beckett's Other Trilogy: Not I, Footfalls and Rockaby’, in Robin J. Davis and Lance St John Butler (eds), ‘Make Sense Who May’: Essays on Samuel Beckett's Later Works (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988) pp. 56-65.

11. Ibid., p. 57.

12. See Enoch Brater, ‘Dada, Surrealism and the Genesis of Not I’, Modern Drama, vol. 18, no. 1 (1975) p. 53.

13. Simone, op. cit., p. 57.