Broken Connections

Extract

“I Can't Go on, I'll Go On.” Both Parts of This Bleak Acknowledgment By Samuel Beckett's Unnamable (407) seem to me appropriate (if not particularly gracious) responses to the honor of the preceding essays, which grow out of a distinguished 2008 MLA panel on what the program called my “career in writing.” First, there is, inevitably, a finalizing or conclusive connotation inherent in both the event and the reference to a “career,” a career that, at least for the purposes of the event meant to celebrate it, can only be located behind me. So the only way to avoid the entombment, the modest monumentalizing, unintentionally (I assume) accomplished in these essays is to insist, as Beckett does, that I must go on. If, to continue on another Beckettian note, there has been a career in writing, it has perhaps been because, somehow, I have not succeeded in failing, or I have at least (or at most) insufficiently failed. The Beckettian voice's exasperation at never having failed enough has always seemed to me to have something to do with the experience of the energizing effect of failures in language, an energy that prevents a voice from entering, and being locked into, the presumed history of a presumed culture.