Beckett and unheard sound

Beckett’s work has often been perceived as pushing towards its own obliteration, ever closer to the silencing of the voice. His ‘characters’ – though hardly that – with decaying, almost useless bodies, situated in barren environments, steadily insist that there is nothing to say and no possibility of knowledge or understanding, while (and by) fi zzling on with their increasingly broken, empty, repetitive, hopeless – and often very funny – narratives of their very attempts to tell meaningful stories. In the process, the language fragments and fi ssures even as it pours forth; whether truncated and percussive, or accumulative and spieling, the effect is equally one of impending exhaustion – of the voice on the brink of silence. Furthermore, this notion of a trajectory ever towards, but never quite achieving, a fi nal annihilation of the voice would seem to be validated by the author, who described his writing as ‘an unnecessary stain on the silence’.1 As Mary Bryden points out, running alongside this is ‘an extraordinarily acute attunement to sound: not just to noise, but to intimate, ambient sound’.2 An encroaching silence beyond this threatens, oxymoronically, ‘to drown all the faint breathings put together’.3 Nevertheless, Beckett’s work is always alive to the buzzings and hummings of apparently insignifi cant sound – extraneous environmental noise, but also the clamour of the mind’s endless dialogue with itself. This is often a curse or, at best, a false distraction from the painful experience of being, but its silencing is feared as much as it is craved. The overarching critical narrative of the drive towards silence