Chapter 2 - Beckett’s Hoarding

Summary

The second chapter begins with a consideration of Beckett’s resistance to the logic of quid pro quo, which, organizing life in the metropolis, impoverishes the imagination. Beckett discovers in listing a form to counteract that urge to calculate. Against older readings of Beckett, recent French readers such as Pascale Casanova and Alain Badiou find the Irish writer revolutionary, associating him with beginnings, resistance, and even happiness. Similarly, I claim that Beckett’s works are surprisingly recuperative. The high modernists used the stream-of-consciousness to emphasize the evanescence and meaninglessness of present action. Transferring that technique to the past tense, Beckett records dissipating practices of everyday life. What’s more, Beckett’s garbled lists provoke readers to impose sense by drawing upon a shared cultural grammar. Beckett’s verbal hoarding makes conceivable a collective bound by shared axioms that reduce abstract multiplicities into knowable situations. Beckett thus posits infranational communities that are consolidated not by institutionally underwritten concepts such as nationality or ethnicity but by remembered practices of everyday life.