Loosening Linearity and Normalising the Breaches: Notes on Beckett’s Poems and Poetry, and Play-Scripts and Dramatic Works

The purpose of this essay is to explore the relation of Beckett’s Poetry to his Drama in terms of an interrogation of their textual and epistemic specificity. This entails highlighting the process of semiosis that links ‘poems’ to ‘Poetry’ and ‘plays’ to ‘Dramatic Works’. My focus on textualisation, rather than genre, wishes to reveal how the loose linearity of single texts can become a cohesive trait of the Beckett corpus. A broad range of Beckettian works are dealt with, and many of them are analysed in detail. Furthermore, debunking the notion of a pessimistic and ‘nihilistic’ Beckett is part of the intent of this interpretative reading. KEYWORDS: Beckett’s aesthetics and ethics; textuality and textualisation; post-human humanism; poems/Poetry; play-scripts/Dramatic Works