Samuel Beckett's Texts for Nothing: Explication and Exposition

Author(s): Elliot Krieger

Source: MLN, Vol. 92, No. 5, Compartive Literature (Dec., 1977), pp. 987-1000
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2906887
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 S AMUEL BECKETT'S TEXTS FOR NOTH-
ING: EXPLICATION AND EXPOSITION
03 ELLIOT KRIEGER m3 Most narrators are, or are
meant to be, human beings. When we read a narrative, we assume
that the author is using narration to communicate to us particular
qualities of mind or circumstance. Consequently, reading the open-
ing words of Beckett's Texts for Nothing:

Suddenly, no, at last, long last, I couldn't any more, I couldn't go on,
(75, 127)1

we assume that a first-person narrator has been caught in a state of

confusion and paralytic frustration, and we probably expect, if we
think about it, that the plot of the Texts will develop by inverting the
standard narrative plot, by examining stasis rather than by creating
crisis, recognition, and resolution. The Texts fit very neatly in
among the received ideas about Beckett's sense of human despair,
resignation, and isolation-until we realize that there is no first-
person narrator. The "I" that speaks throughout the Texts is not a
person, but is the text itself, the black words printed on the white
page. All human referents are consciously delimited as outside-
or, in the words of the text, as "above"-the narrative; as a result,
all readers are isolated from and kept from identifying with the
narrator but are made conscious of one another as a community of
readers, all of whom have been enacted (as "voices" reading the
narration to whom the text both talks and listens) and confronted
by (as the world "above"-"They up above, all around me ... ," 76,
129) the identical textual material.
In the first of the 13 Texts Beckett accomplishes the difficult task
of presenting us clues enough so we can determine that the

I All citations are from Samuel Beckett, Stories and Texts for Nothing (New York
Grove Press, Inc., 1967). Beckett's translation of his own original French text
presents few problems. I have included parenthetically page references both to the
Grove Press edition and to Samuel Beckett, Nouvelles et Textes Pour Rien (Paris: Les
Editions de Minuit, 1958).

MLN 92 (1977) 987-1000

Copyright ? 1977 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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 988 ELLIOT KRIEGER

narrator is the printed text and not an imagined human character.

The clues all take the form of oppositions; in fact, the entire series
of Texts is perceived through a set of oppositions, all of which are
presented in rudimentary form in the first Text. But the primary
opposition (which lets us perceive that the narrator is not a human
speaker but is of a quality fundamentally opposed to our function
as human readers, and thus to make sense of the other oppositions
presented by the narration as the series of Texts proceeds) is of the
temporal tension between process and stasis. The opposition is
presented thematically within the narration as the need to go on
and the desire to stand still; the opposition is present in the first
sentence, quoted above, and frequently throughout the Texts:

I should turn away from it all, away from the body, away from the
head, let them work it out between them, let them cease, I can't, it's I
would have to cease, (75, 128)

or:

And what I'm doing, all-important, breathing in and out and saying,
with words like smoke, I can't go, I can't stay, let's see what happens
next. (77, 131)

But this opposition is not an inarticulate cry of human despair; it is

a reflection of language on its own nature, for one of the
fundamental problems of working with a printed text, as writer or
as reader, is that each word is permanently located in a specific
space, each is static and immobile, but none can have syntactic
significance until process is introduced. In a way this is the
fundamental contradiction between materialism and idealism on
which literature thrives: the opposition between the permanence
through history of any preserved printed text and the perpetual
possibility of a sequence of unrelated unique experiences of
readers, separated in time and space, reading the text. In terms
used in the Textsfor Nothing this is the opposition between "staying
here" and "going on"; the stasis is that presented by each individual
printed word of narration, and the process is supplied by the mind
of the reader-which brings us to the second opposition developed
in the first Text.
The second opposition, developing from the first, is between
human and non-human, or, as those terms are figured in the Texts
for Nothing, between reader and text. The language as it exists in

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 M L N 989

print is a self-enclosed static entity, existing in rows ("faint sheep-

tracks, troughs scooped deep by the rains") of letters-until the
presence, the intrusion, really, of readers transforms the stasis into
process, and forces the text to proceed up and down the page,
which begins to be perceived as a hill or a mountain (75, 128). In
effect, the human intrusion transforms the text from a Promethean
static role-see the narrator's nostalgia for the "old stories" where
"it all happened on a rock" (79, 133-134)-into a Sisyphean
exercise in perpetual frustration-"toiling up the slope . . . I don't
try to understand, I'll never try to understand any more, that's
what you think, for the moment I'm here, always have been, always
shall be . . . " (78, 132-133).
We readers are kept outside of the narration: "They are up
above, all round me, as in a graveyard. I can't raise my eyes to
them, what a pity . .. Do they see me, what can they see of me?"
(76, 129). But functionally, we are allowed engagement with the
process of the narrative in two distinct ways: as a human force
completely separated from the static, non-mimetic text, and as a
voice, which enters into and repeats the words of the text. Our
reading of the words, and our silently formed critical questions, are
absorbed by and repeated in the printed text:

Someone said, You can't stay here ... Someone said, perhaps the
same, What possessed you to come? ... Another said, or the same,
or the first, they all have the same voice, the same ideas, All you had
to do was stay at home. (75-76, 127-128)

These inclusions of external voices, presumably ours as the human

beings reading "up above," link us with the linguistic events of the
narrative at the same time that they keep our human nature
separate from the purely linguistic phenomenon of the textual
narrator. Consequently, we are kept aware of our expected
relation of sympathy and willed participation with the standard
narrative text, and the rigid disjunction enforced in these specific
Texts between our identification with the narrator, which is
prohibited, and our participation in-actually, our creation of-
the process of the narration, which is demanded. The sense of
language locked into itself, with which the first Text concludes

silent, sunk in our worlds, each in his worlds, the hands forgotten in
each other. That's how I've held out till now. And this evening again

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990 ELLIOT KRIEGER

it seems to be working, I'm in my arms, I'm holding myself in my

arms, without much tenderness, but faithfully, faithfully, (79, 134-
135)2

accounts only for the stasis supplied by the narrating text itself, not
for the process supplied for the narrator by the reader. The
potential co-operation and fundamental opposition between textual
stasis and human process is discussed somewhat earlier:

I'm up there and I'm down here, under my gaze, foundered, eyes
closed, ears cupped against the sucking peat, we're of one mind, all
of one mind, always were, deep down, we're fond of one another,
we're sorry for one another, but there it is, there's nothing we can do
for one another. (77, 131-132)

The act of reading fiction includes both sides of this opposition:

actual and causal separation of reader from text (each in his
worlds, nothing we can do) and empathic unity, as reading actually
connects syntactically one separated word with another, and as the
reader endows the narration with the ability to represent his own
human world (under my gaze, we're of one mind).
So far I have concentrated almost exclusively on the first in the
series of Texts for Nothing, for it presents and develops the two
primary sets of oppositions that determine the form and the
content of the entire work. The first Text also presents, in
rudimentary form, three other oppositions, which are considered
in greater detail in subsequent Texts. These three oppositions are:
(1) between narrator and body, which signifies the opposition in
fiction between text and character: "I say to the body, up with you
now, and I can feel it struggling ... " (75, 128); (2) between
narrator and mind, which signifies the opposition in fiction
between text and plot: "I say to the head, Leave it alone, stay quiet,
it stops breathing, then pants on worse than ever" (75, 128); and (3)
between day and night (76, bottom of page), which has a more
complex and polysemous significance that includes oppositions
between black and white, printed words and the blank page, and
lamplight and the closed book. This third opposition is considered
more thoroughly in the second Text.
The simplest explication of the day/night opposition would be
the straightforward one: day is associated with light and with

2 The English "silent," because of its greater sense of volition, improves the
French "muets."

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 M L N 991

living-"Above is the light ... sufficient to see by, the living find
their ways" (81, 137) and night is associated with darkness, the
grave, and death-"it's as dark as in a head before the worms get at
it, ivory dungeon" (82, 139). But such a familiar reduction is too
simple for these difficult Texts. To understand the direction of the
narrative we must purge our valuations of life and death; here the
narrating texts regard the two equally. Light is associated with
process, for only with "sufficient" light "to see by" can readers
engage the text, and dark is associated with stasis, the separation of
each word from the other when light is shut off or when the book is
closed, locking the paper into darkness.
Consequently, as the Texts progress, concurrent with the aware-
ness that "it's always evening" (11; p. 127, 204), that is, that the
book is always about to be closed, an increasingly articulated desire
for stasis emerges:

... that's why it's always evening, to let me have the best to look for-
ward to, the long black night to sleep in. (128, 204)

To sleep in the night is to be freed from the compulsion of

diversity (84) and to be allowed to bask in the isolation of identity.
That is, without the intrusion of the many different voices of the
many different readers from the light, above, in their different
times and places, the text would be freed from its monotonous task
of proceeding, endlessly, through the same syntactic processes.
Although an aspect of the theme of the later Texts is the assertion
by the text of its own negation, of its lack of human qualities, the
Texts toward the end of the series also begin to reach out for a
wider negation-"a new no, to cancel all the others, all the old noes
that buried me down here" (130-131, 209)-which is, I assume, the
negation of the readers, or of our ability to read the text.
The negation of the readers is functionally related to the
negation of the text; we can be eliminated as pretext, and then the
text "won't have lived" (12., p. 134, 213), but the text cannot choose
to ignore us as we can choose to ignore or avoid it. What the text
can do, and what I think these Texts do, is to make us so conscious
of their nature as printed words on page that we cannot supply the
narration with the sympathetic imaginative diversity readers cus-
tomarily bring to fiction. As we relinquish the right to attach plot
and character onto the syntactic process our reading creates, the
text loses its potential specificity of time and place and becomes

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 992 ELLIOT KRIEGER

"nothing ever but nothing and never, nothing ever but lifeless
words." (135, 214)
I would stress words, because, in terms of the imagery developed
throughout, the predominance and eventual triumph of lifeless-
ness, or nothingness, or the winter night of Text 12 ascendant over
the evening of Text 11, is paralleled by the predominance of the
printer's ink, which conveys the text's words and locks them into
their unchanging sequences, over the white of the books' pages,
whose infinite receptivity to linguistic variety is forever delimited
by the text it carries. Each page of printed text is perceived as the
triumph of no over yes, as "the screaming silence of no's knife in
yes's wound" (13, p. 139, 219) and, therefore, as a prelude to the
blackness that will cover each page when the text is not being read.
This pretextual conflict between what is essentially the text's
legible "life" and its annihilation in illegible blackness is expanded
in some of the other Texts to include the oppositions with the
contexts of fiction, that is, concerning the readers' expectations
and predispositions as to the nature of fictional narrative. This
conflict appears in preliminary form in the first Text, when the
narration addresses its body and its head (75), as it does similarly in
Text 11, when the narration proceeds in an interpolated burst of
invention to create a rather hideous physical description of the
narrator (128-129). But the disjunction between the recognizably
human sequential web of social and psychological confrontations
that readers expect in return for their time invested in reading
fiction and the absolute material qualities of print on the page
established by these Texts is most thoroughly exploited and
explored in Text 3, probably the most accessible Text in the series.
Text 3 is accessible, though, only in paradoxical ways; it is
somewhat readable out of its context because it presents the
rudimentary components of a story; however, the field in which
the story is told is such as to undercut completely the story's
fictional premises. That is, Text 3 is not about the story it contains
or suggests, but is about the attempt to tell the story:

I won't say anything, there's going to be a story, someone's going to

try and tell a story. (85, 143)
But I think that it is a simplification to say that this Text
demonstrates the difficulty of narration-there are enough well-
narrated stories in our world and in our time to disprove any such
theories. The Text is a contemplation of the process of reading

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 M L N 993

narration, and, as such, it is structured as a fluctuation between the

imaginative act, however enfeebled, and the permanent unchang-
ing materiality of the printed text. As the primitive features of
narration ("I'll say I'm a body, stirring back and forth, . . . I'll call
that living, I'll say it's me, ... stirring about, holding out, getting to
tomorrow," 85, 143-144) are created, literally, in front of us, we are
kept conscious that the real creation occurs in our heads as we
transform print into a human environment. Consequently we
readers are both included in the story, as a human presence,
echoing the words of the text, and are excluded, as the text
contemplates its alienation from the human process of creation:

I'm starting now, a week is soon served, then back here, this
inextricable place, far from the days . . . (85, 144)
This Text contains the superstructure-character, setting, mood
to some extent-of three stories: the narrator as "old tot" (86-87,
145-146) as war veteran (87-89), and as undirected mobility (89-
90). Each of these structures is prevented from developing into a
full narration, in part by the narrator's resolute refusal to endow its
creations with the vestiges of standard narrative plots-"no one's
going to love you and no one's going to kill you" (86, 145), and
more importantly by the reiterated statement of the narrator's
separation from the human context in which he is perceived and in
which stories assume time, place, and meaning. The narration's
several declarations of its solitude

I am alone, I alone am. (86, 145)

or:

murmuring every ten centuries, It's not me, it's not true, it's not me.
(87, 147)

or:

See what's happening here, where there's no one, where nothing

happens ... (89, 150)

do not signify alienation, but separation-of text from context, of

the print we read from the story it tells to us. The process of
reading Text 3 is that of an increasing realization that the text itself
never changes, and that it, as a material entity, is something
absolutely removed from our human environment and our govern-
ing conceptions of time and space, of personality and inter-action.
Simultaneously, our reading should make us conscious of the

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 994 ELLIOT KRIEGER

enormous resources of our human imaginations, for we have the

capacity to transform the fundamental stasis of a text into a
representation of our complex, mortal, human world.
Text 9 returns to the same theme, but in a more abstract and less
amusing way: in Text 9 the desire to create a story, which in 3 was
also a way for the narrator to "leave all that," is telescoped into the
desire to find "a way out somewhere" (117, 189), although the
search for escape is presented in a bifurcated form, as something
both literary and teleologic. The desire to get "out" is literary
insofar as the narrator claims that an utterance will effect the
escape:

if I could say, There's a way out, there's a way out somewhere, the
rest would come, the other words, sooner or later, and the power to
get there, and pass out. (121, 196)3

Escape becomes teleologic, however, in that the "way out" is

associated with death-"it would be the first step on the long
travelable road, destination tomb" (118, 191),-that is, with the
mortalizing or humanizing of the narrator. The conjunction of
these two components of the narrator's will further sharpens the
distinction between reader and text. What in the earlier Text 3 had
been the more recognizably human desire for creation has here
become the desire for mere iteration and for entry into "sequency
of thought," even if the end of the sequence must necessarily be the
death of the body. Text 9 emphasizes the almost tautological
inability of a text to say anything other than what the text already
says, and consequently of the disjunction between (1) print as the
unchanging repository for the syntax of an individual act of
human creation and (2) the mind's reading as a variable and
creative, if temporary, human activity. As the narration begins
"confusing here and there, now and then" (120, 194)-that is,
itself, our reading, and the moment of its own creation-it also
confuses the state of mind in flux associated with the creative acts
of writing and reading that encompass a text, with the stasis of the

3This passage has some advantages in French, others in English. "II y a une
issue," with its suggestion of conclusion as well as exit, is richer than "there's a way
out." The French "les autres mots me viendraient" and "passer a travers" do not
contain the suggestion of losing consciousness, as might the English "the rest would
come" and "pass out."

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 M L N 995

text itself: "What variety and at the same time what monotony"
(118, 190).
In some ways this distinction between variety and monotony-
each reader and each reading is different but the materials of the
text are always the same-is the most basic, albeit not the most
difficult, in the entire sequence. Four of the Texts-numbers 4, 6, 8,
and 13-concentrate thematically on the context of the narrative
work, on the human environment in which the materials of the text
are conceived by the writer and perceived by the reader. Like the
other oppositions considered in the Texts for Nothing this one
between text and human environment concerns limitation-of
human variety as it is cut down to the specific uniformity of the
printed words; this particular opposition, however, is the first one
to move outside the text, the first in which the narration
considers its relation to a subject indisputably alien from itself.
Since the subjects discussed in these texts are the recognizably
human ones of the writer Beckett and the readers, the oppositions
become somewhat less obscure, and closer in form to a riddle-since
for the first time a human being is the subject matter within the
narration.4 But there is more to these Texts than "getting" the
riddle-He=Beckett; you=the keepers=the readers-for the
dynamics of the narration, the exploration of the quintessentially
human process of reading, depends on the quality of the
relationship established by the inhuman and uniform text with its
human and various environment.
The sense of separation is more precise in Text 4 than in any of
the other Texts in this series, perhaps because we readers are,
except for the brief references to "a voice that makes no sound"
(92, 155), excluded from the narration and we can thus observe
unaffected the unusual attempt of narration to separate itself from
its author, to establish and clarify its independence. The attempt
occurs in several phases or stages. The narrator is first distinguished
from the writer, Beckett, through a pronominal process: the
narrator maintains its existence as "I" while dissociating itself from
a third-person, a "he": "the same old stranger as ever, for whom

4Texts 5 and 7, by the way, about which I shall have nothing else to say, are the
least profound in the sequence, as in them the theme is reduced entirely to a riddle,
and to follow the narration, one need do no more than get the joke or envision, as
human being, the narrator and "his" circumstances.

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996 ELLIOT KRIEGER

alone accusative I exist" (91, 151). The dissociation is not at first,

however, one of independence:

I'm not in his head, nowhere in his old body, and yet I'm there, for
him I'm there, with him, hence all the confusion ... he wants me
there, with a form and a world, like him, in spite of him.... (91,
153- 154)

Although the text is not the repository of the voice of the writer,
the writer controls the words he writes, or "voids," and the sub-
textual assumption is that he wants his written text to re-present
for his readers an image of either his own mind working or of a
mortal human world that he has experienced or imagined. Here,
the text, acknowledging its temporal dependence upon having
been created-"He has me say things saying it's not me . . . he has
me who say nothing say it's not me" (92, 154-155)-reverses the
ordinary process and uses the strength of its own atemporality both
to control its own author and to attain its own mortal life. That is,
as the narrator asserts independence from the characters created
in Beckett's mimetic fiction-"a vulgar Molloy, a common Malone"
(97, 155)-it concomitantly makes the point that the author is
known only through his written texts ("who is none but me"), that
is, through something alien and separate from his creating mind.
What the narrator is unable to do is to take a second syllogistic
step from this first one: although the inhuman text is more real to
the readers than is the human author, it cannot be made to follow
that the text is therefore human, possessed of a "life" (93, 156).
The observations contained within the narrative prevent its achieve-
ment of independence, for, although the narrator asserts that
"what counts is to be in the world" (93, 157), the rest of the Text
emphasizes that more than "being" is required for the existence of
a life. Life necessitates "making progress" (93, 157), and the
ultimate realization within Text 4 that the condition of the narrator
is one of waiting and of stasis (94) restores the temporarily inverted
poles of material text and human context, and separates the
narration from the participation in the world of process and
mortality that it momentarily invokes:
If it's nature perhaps it's trees and birds, they go together, water and
air, so that all may go on ... (93, 156)

Text 6 is in many respects a companion piece to, a reflection of,

Text 4; and Text 8 is a restatement of the two in combination. Text 6

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 M L N 997

contemplates and thereby externalizes the readers who perceive

the narration, as Text 4 did toward the writer who conceived the
narration. Here the readers are identified as "keepers" (101, 167)5
an acknowledgment that the existence of a text is dependent on an
idea external to the text, on the text's being perceived. Yet, being
perceived, the text becomes invested with human properties,
specifically, with the ability to define itself in time and space:

Why keepers, I'm in no danger of stirring an inch, ah I see, it's to

make me think I'm a prisoner, frantic with corporeality, rearing to
get out and away. (101-102, 168)6

But, again, in Text 6, nature is evoked, and the narrator gains

cognition of its separation from nature, of its inability to enter
independently into processes of creation and change:

The air would be there again, the shadows of the sky, drifting over
the earth, and that ant, that ant, oh most excellent head that can't
think. (102, 169)7

Well look at me, a little dust in a little nook, stirred faintly this way
and that by breath straying from the lost without. (103, 170)

As in the earlier Text 4, the existence of the text is separated from

that of its human context in order for the narrator to define itself
more precisely, but the separation rebounds to reinforce the
objectivity of the text. The text is "stirred" by breath, but not
infused with life. The Text relinquishes the previous assertion that
"a story is not compulsory, just life" (4., p. 93, 156), and once more
"hopes" for a story, that is, it redefines itself in terms of the human
expectations and assumptions about the function of a fictive text.
The text re-places itself into our context: "I give you my word"
(105, 174).8
Text 8 is neither particularly interesting nor particularly compli-
cated when read after 4 and 6. Text 8 is also about the attempt of
the narration to separate itself from meaning imposed from

5 The ambiguity of "gardiens"-guardians of a person, keepers of an animal,

caretakers of a building-is lost in the English.
6 The last phrase, which in the French reads "a en faire ceder les murs, les
murailles, les frontieres," makes the human context even more specific.
7 Only in the French is it clear that the last phrase does not refer to the ant:
"heuresement que je n'ai plus de tfte."
8 The French version-je le jure"-omits the pun.

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998 ELLIOT KRIEGER

without, to define time and space for itself and to break apart the
timelessness with which it perceives its own grammar into a
meaningful set of finite statements:

It's for ever the same murmur, flowing unbroken, like a single
endless word and therefore meaningless, for it's the end gives the
meaning to words. (111, 182)

Time has turned into space and there will be no more time, till I get
out of here. (112, 182)9

Again, the text is invested with life only by the reader, inside whose
"imaginary head" it sees itself alive ( 12, 183) and by Beckett, the
"ventriloquist" who "holds me in his arms and moves my lips with -a
string" (1 13, 185). What gives Text 8 its distinction over some of the
earlier Texts is its concentration on the primordial qualities of the
printed words; the narration indicates that in order for the
narrator to reject its objective material existence and to enter a
state of subjectivity and mortality, it must escape its fixed nature as
print:

if they could open, those little words, open and swallow me up ...;
(112, 184)
and:

ah, if no were content to cut yes's throat and never cut its own. (1 13-
114, 186)10

The Text makes a ludicrous attempt to imagine itself as corporeal

(114-115), but the attempt dissolves with the realization that it can
only be expressed as a negation, that is, as printed words fixed in
space and time, and without any internal processes, mortal or

9 The English resolves the ambiguity of the French "le temps s'est fait espace et il
n'y a en aura plus......
10 The French reads, more abstractly, "voilA la beaute toute negative
dont malheuresement les negations subissent le mtme sort, en voila la laideur."
Beckett's inclusion here of the reference to no's knife, an image developed more
fully in Text 13, seems to be one of the few real revisions he made in the English
version. In Text 1, however, "Joe Breem, or Breen" has "a knife between his teeth"
in both the English and the French (79, 134). Note that the image of light, keeper
(gardien, in French), and the knife converge in this character.

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 M L N 999

grammatical, except as supplied by the human environment or

context:

No, the answer is no ... I would know I was here, begging in

another dark, another silence, for another alm, that of being or of
ceasing... (115, 188)

The final Text of the series, 13, offers resolution of this

opposition between text and its human context, but it does so in an
exceptional way, in that the resolution is not a thematic synthesis of
the content of the series, but is a formal recognition within the Text
that the reader's reading is nearing completion. This completion of
the reading process has a double function regarding the position of
the text: the text is completely separated from its contiguity with
the world of time and space ("Air, dust, there is no air here, nor
anything to make dust, and to speak of instants, to speak of once, is
to speak of nothing," 137-138,216), and concomitantly, with the
acknowledgment of its nothingness when severed from the passive
act of being read, the Text is able to suggest an annihilation of its
readers. That is, by: (1) asserting once more that as we read, our
vocalizations of the narration are attempts to "make" the Text, to
"speak of life" or to form the Text into a representation of our
human existence; and yet (2) reminding us that the human content
of the Text is only referential, and "elsewhere" while "unfortunate-
ly it is not a question of elsewhere, but of here" (138, 216), that the
pages before us are only objects, not things mortal; (3) the Text
returns whatever failures have been narrated in the series to the
readers of the Texts for Nothing and reduces the act of reading to
reiteration of emptiness and nothingness. The last thing that
happens as we read the last of the Texts of the series is that we are
reminded that the Text is an object, not a voice or a representation
of one.
The Textsfor Nothing makes us so conscious of its quality as black
words printed on white page that it makes it impossible for us to
use the words to imagine in our own minds a human environment
inhabited by the Texts. Yet by cutting itself off from humanity, the
Texts for Nothing emphasizes the shared human environment of its
readers: "it's all the same dream, the same silence, it and me, it and
him, him and me, and all our train, and all theirs . . . " (139, 219).
The Texts make us acutely aware of having read, of having created
a process where only stasis existed objectively. The Trinitarian
allusion in the last and other Texts (cf., 12, p. 134) is not accidental.

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1000 ELLIOT KRIEGER

Reading and writing, the acts of making and of wanting to "leave a

trace, of what is made, or what is said ... yes, like air leaves among
the leaves, among the grass, among the sand, it's with that it would
make a life," (137, 216)11 may be the closest human beings can
approach to godliness in the natural world.

The University of Massachusetts/Boston

11 The English of Text 13 re-emphasizes the physical properties of the book. The
pun in "infant langours in the end sheets" (139) does not hold good in the French
"petite fllue dans les draps de la fin," (218). The pun in traces "among the leaves"
does hold in "parmi les feuilles"-but Beckett intensifies the pun by using the
English verb "to leave."

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