Who reads Beckett? As opposed, that is, to watching his stuff on stage or on television. One doubts if they are all that many…. But publishers appear to believe in the persistence of readerly interest, and in its variety; so that Beckett is made available, and to an extent surely unique among living authors, for communion—oecumenically, as it were—in a most interesting variety of kinds….

[Worstward Ho] is for the steady customers, whoever they are, the people waiting, one imagines not unkeenly, to pick up where the last published text of the master, Ill Seen, Ill Said, left them. For its part, [Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, edited by Ruby Cohn,] will doubtless interest some of these, though probably not all of them. It consists of old and arcane things, dusted off essays and reviews, pieces on other writers and on painters, a tiny clutch of letters, fragments of Beckett's first novel, a bit of an unfinished play. Some of these are already in print—though often in the remoter corners of the available Beckettiana; some have never been published before. They come mainly in three out of Beckett's five or so languages, with some of the German translated into English, but none of the French. Beckett "belittles" these materials, but since they're for "scholars", who're supposed to be eager for anything and everything Beckett might disject their way, the author in his undoubted kindness hasn't impeded the "scholarly" efforts of Ruby Cohn. These "scholars", it can be assumed, however, won't be spending much time on John Calder's second, updated selection from the oeuvre [A Samuel Beckett Reader]. Even the most haphazard "scholar" will have all the Calder extracts on the shelf already.

The Beckett thus available, though, is not quite the same animal on each of these occasions. At least Cohn's differs rather sharply from Calder's. So much so that one is driven to wonder which midwife's. Beckett is better, or at least which one is bringing forth, so to say, Beckett's Beckett….

Beckett himself, in a marvellously biting piece dug out by Ruby Cohn, praised Ezra Pound for his "Spartan maieutics". What is most striking about this old-young Beckett is the raw aggression of its theory and practice. Disjecta—Beckett's own title—are in a simple sense things that have been dispersed, scattered. They're also, though, things that have been dashed to pieces, brought to nought, frustrated, even squandered. So while Disjecta denotes the glum depredations of time it also declares an aesthetic that wills the destruction of old forms and chooses to live with the consequent chaos.

This Beckett is the ally of revolutionary aesthetician Eugène Jolas, in the pages of whose magazine transition the [essay "Dante … Bruno. Vico.. Joyce"] appeared. He warms to his own "foul fist", and likes Endgame's power to "claw" and "hook" audiences. He wants to rip up the veil of speech, to bore holes through language, to assault the word…. In the extracts from Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Beckett's first novel (which it's extremely useful to be able to get one's hands on, even so patchily), Belacqua [the protagonist], is made to stand for an untidy, discomposed art. According to him, Balzacian naturalism is "chloroformed", a world of "clockwork cabbages". Belacqua preaches instead corrosion, disfaction, dehiscence—that is, the fruitfulness of gaps, of bursting open literature. In other words, Belacqua views disjection as a most promising pursuit. And Beckett agrees. Juno and the Paycock is good because it has "dramatic dehiscence". The house of fiction must become "ramshackle, tumbledown". The bike of literature is to be a boneshaker. And how negativism accumulates, and in three or four tongues…. The "breakdown of the object", which comes, Beckett asserts, to the same thing as "the breakdown of the subject", is embraced as the essence of the modern. (p. 135)

The "dehiscing" Beckett has little that's genial about him, nothing much that hints of Calder's recuperated Parnassian, the Grand Old Man Of Modern Letters, the Nobel Laureate. Nor of the meditative writer praised by Christopher Ricks on the back cover of Calder's volume for being "the great soothsayer of our age" who has revived "an art of contemplation" despite "a world of sick hurry". In disjection Beckett is the sick joker and jostler, the hurryer-up and shitter-upon….

Granted that the litany of truncated parts of speech of which Worstward Ho consists gets very hypnotic and so almost lulling. Granted, as well, that this text's old man and child, fallen and exiled from paradise or the womb or whatever, are yet in motion and visible…. Granted, again, that the "scene" that's "seen" and "said" here is promised continuing existence … so long as the observing, containing head and eye and voice survive. And, to be sure—like the paradox of "Gone for good"—the prevailing rhetoric of worseness and leastness does indeed scrape up a kind of self-refuting positive air which has something to do with the superlative mostness of its awfulness…. Utterance still contrives to ooze out and to get itself secreted. And the text is moved to joy over this. "Remains of mind then still. Enough still. Somewhose somewhere somehow enough still. No mind and words? Even such words. So enough still Just enough still to joy. Joy!"

As grounds for readerly joy, however, Worstward Ho still looks pretty slight, even pinchbeck. After all, what it utters is the terror of a solipsism of text as shocking and as unalleviatable by that sliver of joy as Murphy's solipsism of self was unalleviated by jokes and general lightness of address…. In brief—and by this stage Beckett always is in brief—there's no evading hereabouts that hardest of all reflections, the terrible notion of the uttermost silencing of the death of language, of speakers, narrators, writers, oneself. "What when words gone? None for what then." At such moments playing with paradoxes like "Gone for good" doesn't comfort. This is a disconsolation that Worstward Ho rightly acknowledges as being familiar to Beckett and Beckett's readers. "All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." Failing better might have more dash and finish, even less flinching about it—which can all be claimed of this latest Beckett—but it is also, logically, to be even worse off spiritually, humanly speaking. Worstward Ho is back, for better or worse, where Ruby Cohn's collection shows Beckett so powerfully starting. (p. 136)