1. Richard Kearney, "Beckett: The Demythologizing Intellect," in The Irish Mind: Exploring Intellectual Traditions , ed. Richard Kearney (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1985), 267-293; J. C. C. Mays, "Mythologized Presences: Murphy in Its Time," in Myth and Reality in Irish Literature , ed. Joseph Ronsley (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1977), 198-218; John P. Harrington, The Irish Beckett (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991). See also David Lloyd, "Writing in the Shit: Beckett, Nationalism, and the Colonial Subject," in Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 41-58; Mary Junker, Beckett: The Irish Dimension (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1995); John Fletcher, ''Modernism and Samuel Beckett," in Facets of European Modernism (Norwich: University of East Anglia Press, 1985), 199-217; and Lois Gordon, The World of Samuel Beckett, 1906-1946 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 7-31.

2. Samuel Beckett, "Dante . . . Bruno. Vico.. Joyce," in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment , ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984), 26.

3. Samuel Beckett, Proust (New York: Grove Press, 1957), 59. Hereafter cited in text as Proust .

4. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 300.

5. Foucault, The Order of Things , 384.

6. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason , trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1965), 288-289.

7. Samuel Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women , ed. Eoin O'Brien and Edith Fournier (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1992), 102 (cited in text as DFMW); Disjecta, 48 .

8. For an insightful discussion of Foucault's relation to the cultural project of modernism, see John Rajchman, "Foucault, or the Ends of Modernism," October 24 (1983): 37-62; for the conception of an intransitive writing, see Roland Barthes, "To Write: An Intransitive Verb? in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 134-156. Notably, Barthes takes "the case of the Proustian narrator" as "exemplary": "he exists only in writing" (143).

9. Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the Narcissus (London: Penguin Books, 1988), xlvii, 1.

10. Harrington, The Irish Beckett , 48. John Fletcher writes of postindependence Dublin, "the city stood, in international terms, a bit higher than Monrovia, not so high as Copenhagen, and at about the same level as Bogotà" ("Modernism and Samuel Beckett," 199).

11. Such differences are, however, historical , not static, timeless essences. They are pertinent only as the shifting articulations of a hierarchical structure of relations, within which individual elements take on their meanings. As Louis Althusser suggests of such differential structures: "The present of one level is . . . the absence of another, and this co-existence of a 'presence' and absences is simply the effect of the structure of the whole in its articulated decentricity. What is thus grasped as absences in a localized presence is precisely the non-localization of the structure of the whole." Louis Althusser and Éti-enne Balibar, Reading Capital , trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970), 104. Yet Althusser's account also implies that the very differences that serve to localize literary artifacts in national and generic traditions, assigning them places in the historical narrative dedicated to these constructs, may also render them vulnerable to failure, subversion, and historical change. In their restless mobilis, their consistent recombination and reconfiguration, such differences rattle the frames by which, in traditional historicist writing, their geographical and textual mobility would be slowed and controlled: the metahistorical borderlines of genre and nation. On this latter point, see Homi K. Bhabha, "DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation," in Nation and Narration , ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 291-322.

12. On this point, see H. Porter Abbott, "Late Modernism: Samuel Beckett and the Art of the Oeuvre," in Around the Absurd: Essays on Modern and Post-modern Drama , ed. Enoch Brater and Kuby Cohn (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 73-96. Abbott notes the peculiar rhythm of "return" that subsists between Beckett's prose and his dramatic works: "It was not nostalgia that animated Beckett when, at the moment he appeared to have abolished character from his prose fiction, he reinstated it so brilliantly on the stage. It has frequently been noted that when Beckett moves to a new genre or medium he appears to revert to an earlier stage of historical development from that to which he had brought the genre or medium in which he had been previously working" (85).

13. Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London: Methuen, 1984), 10.

14. Jacqueline Hoefer, " Watt ," reprinted in Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays , ed. Martin Esslin (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 62-76.

15. Hugh Kenner, Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 132.

16. Eric P. Levy Beckett and the Voice of Species: A Study of the Prose Fiction (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble Books, 1980), 1-2.

17. Gerald L. Bruns, "Stevens without Epistemology," in Wallace Stevens : The Poetics of Modernism , ed. Albert Gelpi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 24-40.

18. Beckett, quoted by Linda Ben-Zvi, "Fritz Mauthner for Company," Journal of Beckett Studies 9 (1984): 66.

19. Beckett to MacGreevy, July 1930, quoted in James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 122.

20. Beckett to MacGreevy, September 1937, quoted in Knowlson, Damned to Fame , 248. See also Beckett's script for Film , which offers a particularly explicit instance of this hollow use of philosophy: " Esse est percipi. / All extraneous perception suppressed, animal, human, divine, self-perception maintains in being. / Search of non-being in flight from extraneous perception breaking down in inescapability of self-perception. / No truth value attaches to above, regarded as merely structural and dramatic convenience." Samuel Beckett, Film (New York: Grove Press, 1969), 11.

21. Although his concerns are somewhat different from mine, I find support for my "anti-epistemological reading" of Beckett in M. Keith Booker's chapters on Watt and The Lost Ones in Literature and Domination: Sex, Knowledge, and Power in Modern Literature (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1993), 20-41, 142-160.

22. Charles R. Lyons, "Beckett, Shakespeare, and the Making of Theory," in Brater and Cohn, Around the Absurd , 117.

23. For example, one plausible way to interpret Waiting for Godot might be to consider whether "waiting" is not a valid form of solidarity, a way of being together no worse, and perhaps better, than many others. Wolfgang Iser has noted that Beckett's designed foiling of the audience's desire to know—who Godot is, whether he will come—eventually produces a kind of freedom or "levity" in the actions and speech of the characters: "As the meaning projections of the spectator are incapable of removing the indeterminacy of the situations, so the two main characters seem more and more free and unconcerned. They seem to be quite indifferent to the earnestness assumed by the spectator." Iser, "When Is the End Not the End? The Idea of Fiction in Beckett," in On Beckett: Essays and Criticism , ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove Press, 1986), 60. We might put this otherwise by saying that if Beckett's writing still has an "intransitive'' quality to it, it is no longer because it refers back to the autonomy of a thinking consciousness, as did modernist writing, but rather to the autonomy of social forms and practices ungroundable by reliable knowledge: narrating, waiting, searching, playing.

24. Leo Bersani, "Against Ulysses, " in The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 170.

25. Both quotes are from Beckett, The Unnameable , in Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable (New York: Grove Press, 1955, 1956, 1958), 336, 348.

26. Bersani, "Against Ulysses, " 169.

27. This might seem a paradoxical statement given that I will explicate in detail Beckett's allusion to "the Stalinist comedians," Bim and Bom. This allusion, however, illustrates quite aptly how in his work a tidbit of cultural arcana may degenerate into a mere fragment of language, a kind of idiot's babble of minimal differences: "bim, bom . . ." The responsibility for any unfortunate resuscitation of meaning lies wholly with the explicator.

28. For a detailed account of Joyce's influence on Beckett's works, see Barbara Reich Gluck, Beckett and Joyce: Friendship and Fiction (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1979). Cf. the essays on Joyce and Beckett by S. E. Gontarski, David Hayman, and Richard Pearce in the conference volume The Seventh of Joyce , ed. Bernard Benstock (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 25-49.

29. Samuel Beckett, "Sedendo et Quiesciendo," transition 21 (1932): 13.

30. Beckett to Charles Prentice, 15 August 1932, quoted in Knowlson, Damned to Fame , 156.

31. Harrington, The Irish Beckett , 70.

32. Samuel Beckett, More Pricks Than Kicks (New York: Grove Press, 1972), 187.

33. Interestingly, in the early drafts of Watt , Watt's employer Mr. Knott was called Quin. See Ann Beer, "Watt, Knott, and Beckett's Bilingualism," Journal of Beckett Studies 10 (1985): 48ff. This suggests an occult relation between Mr. Knott's strange house and the punning source of his predecessor's name. "Cap-per Quin" of More Pricks Than Kicks , later declined as "Cooper" in Murphy , ultimately comes—according to J. C. C. Mays—from a Trappist monastery in Munster at Cappoquin. Mays, "Mythologized Presences," 215. This instance of mutilated incorporation is far from unique in Beckett's corpus; as more unpublished materials come to light examples will surely multiply. What is of interest, however, along with the thematic clues such connections provide, is their near-inscrutability in the published texts. Beckett retains just enough intertextual communication between works to suggest something missing, but not enough to allow us to reconstruct it or even know what there is to reconstruct.

34. Samuel Beckett, Watt (New York: Grove Press, 1959), 247; cf. Leslie Hill, Beckett's Fiction in Different Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 28: " Watt , as a novel, as the presence of the Addenda show, is marked in its very structure by this puzzle of failed incorporation."

35. Rosalind Krauss, "Antivision," October 36 (1986): 149. Krauss is referring to the work of Beckett's contemporary Georges Bataille.

36. The original is in German. I cite from Martin Esslin's translation, provided in the notes in Disjecta , 172. H. Porter Abbott, in his already-cited essay on Beckett as "late modernist," cites this letter as evidence of Beckett's continuing sympathy for "his modernist masters," meaning for Abbott, Proust and Joyce. But he ignores both what Beckett says in the Axel Kaun letter, taking Gertrude Stein's part against Joyce, and what that choice implied in the concrete context. Since transition was Joyce's most important supporter while Finnegans Wake was "in progress," and the same journal had "indicted" Gertrude Stein following the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas , Beckett's choice provides further evidence of his rejection of transition's program. As I have suggested, Beckett used the fulcrum of Lewis's aggressive antimodernist polemics and Stein's radical attack on ''literary" language as a means of articulating his own late modernist stance.

37. Cathleen Culotta Andonian's 1989 bibliography of criticism, Samuel Beckett: A Refrence Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989), lists only one entry discussing Beckett and Stein together: a chapter in Bruce F. Kawin's book, Telling It Again and Again: Repetition in Literature and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972). That in the great industry of Beckett criticism almost nothing has been made of the Stein-Beckett connection, despite the clearly Steinian constructions in Watt and analogous uses of grammar and syntax in the late prose, can only testify to the immense academic attraction of the Joycean aesthetic, which legitimates the role of exegetes as the caretakers of culture, over one that calls in question the exegetical role.

38. For discussions of these hybrid styles see Marjorie Perloff, " 'A Fine New Kind of Realism': Six Stein Styles in Search of a Reader," in Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univcrsity Press, 1990), 145-159; and Perloff, "Between Verse and Prose: Beckett and the New Poetry;" in The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 135-154.

39. Sarmuel Beckett, Murphy (New York: Grove Press, 1957) 1. Cited in text as Mur.

40. Samuel Beckett, "A Wet Night," in More Pricks Than Kicks (New York: Grove Press, 1972), 47-84. Beckett, in fact, implies this parallel; he calls Murphy's fantasy of "embryonal repose" quoted in the previous passage his "Belacqua fantasy" ( Mur , 78), referring both to Dante's denizen of purgatory and his own Dublin aesthete.

41. "Bim" published his memoirs in the year after Stalin's death; however, it is doubtful that the old clown needed to learn any new tricks for his new masters. Ivan Semenovich Radunskii, Zapiski starogo klouna (Memoirs of an Old Clown) (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1954).

42. This account of Bim and Bom derives from Tsirk: Malen'kaia Entsiklopediia (Circus: A Little Encyclopedia), 2d ed., ed. I. A. Dmitriev et al. (Moscow: Press "Soviet Encyclopedia," 1979), 67; Great Soviet Encylopedia , trans. of 3d ed. of Bolshaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia , ed. A.M. Prokorov (New York: Macmillan, 1973 ), 271; and Joel Schechter, "Bim, Bom and The Laugh," Theater (Winter/Spring 1980): 34-37.

43. See Schechter, "Bim, Bom, and The Laugh, " for a discussion of Serafimovich's novel and a translation of The Laugh . The issue of Theater in which Schechter's article appears also includes a recording of Bim-Bom's play.

44. Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 670, n.4.

45. Richard Aidington, The Colonel's Daughter [1931] (London: Hogarth Press, 1986), 351.

46. For the details of Lewis's debate with transition , see Dougald McMillan, transition: The History of a Literary Era , 1927-1938 (New York: George Braziller, 1975), 204-231. See also pp.148-156, on Beckett's ambivalent relation to transition . Although he contributed to transition's forum on Joyce's "Work in Progress," published poetry and prose works there, and signed the "Poetry Is Vertical" manifesto of 1931, he seems ultimately not to have been able to affirm Eugene Jolas's visionary poetics with any great conviction. As McMillan notes, "In their irreverent negative treatment of the interior expression of a metaphysical longing Beckett's works are almost a parody of the search for metaphysical experience undertaken by Crane, Jolas, and many, of the other transition writers" (152). "Almost," I believe, is too weak; Beckett explicitly parodies this search, satirizing above all the transition ephebe and aspiring modernist Samuel Beckett and discovering himself in self-reflexive laughter.

47. Fülüp-Miller, quoted by Lewis, "Paleface," The Enemy 2 (September 1927): 106-108.

48. Paul Mann has argued that this dialectical recuperation of marginal dissent is essential to the history and social functioning of the avant-garde. He writes: "In late capitalism the margin is not ostracized; it is discursively engaged. The fatality of recuperation proceeds not from any laws of nature but from dialectical engagement, the (never altogether conscious) commitment by any artist or movement to discursive exchange. The discourse of the avant-garde interests us not because it is an opportunity to promote or discredit another revolutionary romance but because it is the most fully articulated discourse of the technology of recuperation." Mann, The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 15. In my view, Mann's theoretically articulate argument is already implicit in the late modernist works of Lewis and Beckett.

49. It is notable that Beckett's one enduring political engagement was with the French Resistance. He was decorated after the war for his wartime activity and until his death gave significant sums of money to a fund for Resistance veterans.

50. David Lodge, "The Language of Modernist Fiction: Metaphor and Metonymy," in Modernism: A Guide to European Literature , 1890-1930, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (London: Penguin Books, 1976), 484.

51. In the later fiction (perhaps even with The Unnameable , if taken out of the name sequence) Beckett recurs to the "metaphorical" mode of titling: How It Is, The Lost Ones , "Imagination Dead Imagine," Company, Worstward Ho, Ill Seen Ill Said , and so on. This may reflect Beckett's tendency toward prose that uses "poetic" means: the increasing dominance, in Jakobson's terms, of "paradigmatic'' devices like clusters of imagery and sound structure, while the "syntagmatic" dimension of the text, its narrational and other extensional structure, is progressively reduced.

52. After Murphy's death, at the inquest, the county coroner cheekily asks of Celia: " 'And this young lady . . . who knew him in such detail, such opportune detail—. . . . Did Miss Kelly murmur Murphy . . . or Mr. Murphy?" ( Mur , 268).

53. Ruby Cohn, Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1962), 53.

54. Beckett gives another faint echo of this pun in his portrayal of Neary, driven to distraction by Miss Counihan's rebuff of his attentions. Rescued by his former student Wylie at the Dublin Post Office, Neary is described as having "rocked blissfully on the fight arm of his rescuer" ( Mur , 43).

55. Bair, Samuel Beckett , 303. Bair cites a letter to George Reavey of 26 September 1939 as evidence.

56. Discussing the Beckett-Giacometti parallel (but of limited critical value) are Matti Megged, "Beckett and Giacometti," Partisan Review 49, no. 3 (1982): 400-406, and Megged, Dialogue in the Void: Beckett and Giacometti (New York: Lumen Books, 1985).

57. Rosalind Krauss, "No More Play," in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 57-58.

58. Krauss, "No More Play," 62.

59. During the twenties and early thirties, Roussel was the subject of articles by Philippe Soupault, Roger Vitrac, Salvador Dali, André Breton, and Michel Leiris; for English translations of all but Leiris's articles (included is another article by Leiris from 1954, but not two others from 1935 and 1936), see Raymond Roussel.' Life, Death and Works (Atlas Anthology, no. 4) (London: Arias Press, 1987). Translations from Roussel also appeared in transition . It would be surprising, then, if Beckett, actively reading and translating the French literary avant-garde, were not aware of Roussel's work.

60. Raymond Roussel, How I Wrote Certain of My Books , trans. Trevor Winkfield (New York: Sun, 1975), 5.

61. Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel , trans. Charles Ruas (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1986), 26.

62. See, for example, how the hospital in Murphy , the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat, becomes associated with Celia's "mercyseat," Murphy's sexual relief, through linguistic association. Thus, Celia the prostitute is recalled by (Mary) Magdalen; furthermore, Murphy's (or the narrator's) euphemism for sexual intercourse, "music," is conjured up by the initials M.M.M., like a moan of satisfaction (mmm . . .), and in turn self-consciously referred to the typographical conventions of the printed book (note, too, the intentionally faulty grammar of the sentence, eliding its actual subject, Murphy): "Late that afternoon, after many fruitless hours in the chair, it would be just about the time Celia was telling her story, M.M.M. stood suddenly for music, MUSIC, MUSIC, in brilliant, brevier and canon, or some such typographical scream, if the gentle compositor would be so friendly'' ( Mur , 236).

63. Beckett, More Pricks Than Kicks , 38.

64. Beckett, Watt , 164.