Worsening Shades

Abstract

Beckett’s late prose texts Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho perform a radical process of literary reimagination late in a long writing career: they reconfigure how biography relates to narrative, and they rethink the dimensionality and mobility of character. In their negotiations with literary history and etymology these texts replenish the stocks of language across the deep time of its evolution and its accrual of semantic and associative richness. In their rich geological and archaeological dispositions, the three texts of Nohow On demonstrate how deep time intersects with the narrative present in images of the earth, providing a locus for life and afterlife: both in the sense of the posthumous condition and in offering belated aesthetic possibilities.