“I say it as I hear it”: Fundamental Sounds in Samuel Beckett’s Later Texts

This essay explores how Samuel Beckett’s later work systematically unsettles traditional genre boundaries through his pursuit of “fundamental sounds” and linguistic precision. Beckett’s meticulous search for the mot juste – a process intensified by his practice of self-translation – accelerates a dissolution of genres already latent in his early writings. In his late prose, drama, and radio texts, this impulse produces increasingly hybrid forms: prose acquires overtly performative traits; stage plays migrate into poetic contexts; radio compositions generate unexpectedly vivid visual worlds. Such movements expose the instability of genre categories and invite reflection on what remains of drama when dialogue disappears, on how prose functions when stripped to rhythmic or aural essentials, and on the capacity of ostensibly auditory works to transcend their medium. Through close textual analysis, the paper examines how Beckett’s attention to sound, rhythm, and aural resonance shapes the ontology of his works, revealing a poetics grounded in indeterminacy. Rather than a stylistic refinement alone, Beckett’s fidelity to linguistic exactness emerges as a form of resistance to aesthetic categorisation. Ultimately, the study argues that Beckett’s late oeuvre exemplifies a sustained interrogation of medium and mode, in which the sound of the word becomes the site of genre’s ongoing unmaking. KEYWORDS: Samuel Beckett; sound; aurality; genre