Suddenly Beckett

Abstract

The first sentence of the first page of the first of the thirteen short prose pieces that make up Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing begins: ‘Suddenly, no, at last, long last, I couldn’t any more, I couldn’t go on’. Texts for Nothing gets going by describing a past inability to continue, but this information is presented only after it is clarified that this incapacity, which is initially said to have beset the speaker in an instant (‘suddenly’), actually took a long time to develop (‘at last, long last’). If ‘suddenly’ heralds an abrupt or unforeseen occurrence, the opening sentence of Texts retracts this sense of haste or surprise before it provides any information about the event in question. The result is that ‘no’, the immediate response to ‘suddenly’, feels more sudden than ‘suddenly’, as if with its second word the text were reflecting on and summarily condemning the appropriateness of its first. Freed from the task of modifying the rest of the sentence, the adverb that starts things off is to be set aside, no longer a functional syntactic or semantic element. In opening with a word that it promptly rejects, Texts alerts us that any and every subsequent word may be no less provisional. Scarcely a few syllables in, the commitment of this prose to its own articulations is already very much in doubt.