Beckett’s Silences and Late Modernity
Resource
NTU Studies in Language and Literature, 26, 121-136
Journal
NTU Studies in Language and Literature
Journal Issue
26
Pages
121-136
Date Issued
2011-12
Date
2011-12
Author(s)
Chesney, D.M.
Abstract
In this paper, I lay the groundwork for understanding the gamut of silences in
Beckett’s work. I start by briefly reviewing some figures from classical rhetoric to
pinpoint aposiopesis, reticence, and ellipsis as key figures for the discourse of
silence. Skipping a great deal—for instance how this rhetorical tradition is
transformed over the course of the historical development of aesthetics, linguistics,
pragmatics, and so forth—I take up the issue again in the Modernist questioning of
silence developed in the thought of Theodor W. Adorno, particularly with reference
to the plays and prose of Beckett. I show how the desirability of silence (“Oh all to
end!”) and its concomitant impossibility express an aesthetic problematic at the end
of Modernity palpably felt by Beckett, as well as—through Adorno’s thinking about
the aesthetic—ethical and philosophical problems that twentieth-century art,
particularly art “after Auschwitz,” must grapple with. Beckett, ever approaching
closer to an impossible silence, is the key figure in a late Modernist tradition that
nonetheless holds fast, despite a changing cultural dominant, to the emancipatory or
redemptive possibilities of the embattled aesthetic—which Adorno devoted his later
years to theorizing.
（This paper is a preview of a forthcoming book-length study of Samuel Beckett）
Subjects
貝克特、沉默、阿多諾、晚期現代主義
Samuel Beckett, Silence, Theodor W. Adorno, late Modernism
Type
journal article