This chapter begins by interrogating the ideal of authenticity as a paradigmatic modern response to the crisis of master narratives. It critically examines practices of narrative selfhood, and discusses the ways in which social roles offer scaffolds for the development of a self without fully constituting such a self. Role-playing – the inhabitation of social and narrative roles – is an outstanding example of the exercise of imagination, its double function of finding and making, and its for-the-most-part inherited, moulded, and largely habituated practice. The chapter concludes with a theological discussion of the ways our habitual imagination of selfhood can be broken open without pretence that we might be able to find a fully realized authentic self beneath our narrative and social roles.

What is the threshold that intervenes between one mind and another, across which the act of looking takes place?

This essay addresses this question, in relation to the work of Samuel Beckett, W. G. Sebald and J. M. Coetzee. All three writers are centrally concerned with what I here call the ‘threshold of vision’ – and for all three writers, to think this threshold requires an act of ethical imagination. This is the case for the exchange of any look between one consciousness and another; but for all three writers this exchange becomes particularly charged when it is shared between human and animal. The essay reads the act of looking through this relation between human and nonhuman, to produce a critical account of the politics of shared life, as this exceeds our given taxonomies for imagining consciousness.

This essay offers a speculative account of a third wave of Beckett criticism, emerging at the turn of the current century, one which is dedicated to the articulation of a Beckettian literary politics.

The first two waves of Beckett criticism, the essay suggests, despite their manifest differences, shared a sense that Beckett was in some fundamental sense an apolitical writer. The first wave sees his work as invested in a universal condition, which is resistant to any form of political particularity. The second tended to see his writing as a deconstructive endeavour, one which reveals not an essential human condition, but the groundless of all forms of being.

Both of these waves of criticism, the essay argues, tend to overlook a central dynamic in Beckett’s writing, in which a rejection of forms of reference coincides with a longing, however residual, for forms of political community. The urge towards solitude in Beckett is countered by an equally strong urge towards company, towards shared life. To begin to articulate a Beckettian politics, as part of a third wave of Beckett criticism, it is necessary to develop a critical language that can account at once for Beckett’s negativity – his refusal of political commitments – and for his persistent attachment to the word that he seems to disavow.

Throughout Beckett’s later prose and drama, in Company, Stirrings Still, …but the clouds…, there emerges at key moments the figure of the back road. Beckett’s narrator imagines a character walking in a featureless place, ‘nowhere in particular on the way from A to Z’. But then he corrects himself. ‘Or say for verisimilitude the Ballyogan Road. That dear old back road’.

This re-emergence of the back road in late Beckett calls, at each occurrence, to an Irish tradition, that has always been secreted in Beckett’s writing, somewhere in the back of the mind, or the back of the page. This essay reads this back road, as it suggests a principle of historical and cultural transmission, by which Beckett reaches backwards trough a lineage of Irish writers who sit at an angle to their own historical moment, and forwards to writers who come after Beckett, and who seek to inherit his own particular Irish legacy. The back road, and the concept of the back more generally, is a recurrent concern for writers in this tradition, from Maria Edgeworth, to Elizabeth Bowen, to John Banville. In tracing the passage of the back road from Edgeworth to Banville, this essay at once summons a minor tradition to which all of these writers belong and suggests a means by which a minor tradition might be critically articulated.

Is happiness possible in the Anthropocene? If, as Sarah Ahmed suggests, happiness is the mark of an accommodation with the future, then what becomes of the possibility of happiness when our planetary relation to the future has become estranged?

This essay considers this question, in relation to two performances staged in the summer of 2021, a site specific piece entitled Beckett in Folkestone, and a production of Beckett’s Happy Days, directed by Trevor Nunn at the Riverside Studios.

Both pieces, staged as we were emerging from the Covid lockdown and in the midst of ecological and biopolitical crisis, conduct a forensic examination of how it is possible now to share each other’s lives, enter into collective futures, or look forward, like Beckett’s Winnie, to another happy day.

In reading the pieces together, the essay looks to the imaginative forms in which we can encounter happiness, not as an accommodation with the future, but as the expression of a radical hope.

This essay traces a tradition of what is here called ‘deathwriting’ as it stretches from Emily Dickinson, to Franz Kafka, to Samuel Beckett, to Cormac McCarthy. The work of all these writers, the essay argues, is driven by the urge to give a poetic form to the experience of death, to make death thinkable and narratable. Alongside this tradition of deathwriting, and interwoven with it, one can discern too, a fascination with ‘blind seeing’, an attempt to make darkness visible, or to overcome the distinction between the light and the dark, the visible and the invisible. In reading the connection between deathwriting and blind seeing as it runs from Dickinson to the contemporary, the essay argues that these writers allow us to glimpse a differently constituted relationship between the living and the dead, and between the perceptible and the imperceptible. At a contemporary moment when it has become urgent to rethink our apparatuses for world picturing, with the emergence of the Anthropocene as a critical context for all of our imaginings, the essay offers this history of deathwriting as a radically different way of seeing, without the aid of human light.

Chapter 10 offers a way through, not by opposing poverty, but reframing it. Being poor in world and captivated by its technological environment, marks the regress of humans from homo faber to animal laborans; but while the latter still could locate the self within a cosmic and divine order, all such locating is now forfeit. Our second reading of poverty, aided by Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape, however, embraces the possibility of new beginning; the wind that stirs and in whose uneven gusts the potential for the revision of the self emerges.

This chapter considers the formal and thematic legacy of Dostoevsky, Proust, Kafka, and Beckett on Kazuo Ishiguro’s late-modernist work. Situating Ishiguro’s lengthiest, most digressive, most formally challenging and funniest novel within the European modernist tradition, the chapter analyses its marked formal experimentation in the light of its idiosyncratic and often highly disturbing blend of humour and mishap, of comedy and adversity. The chapter proposes that The Unconsoled can be considered not only Ishiguro’s but also one of late-modernism’s great comic novels. As such, Ishiguro’s novel may be said successfully to resist the major consolation of meaning-making, parting company with narrative as a calmative and leaving behind the affirmations of consolation and solace.

This chapter argues that Samuel Beckett’s plays function as a kind of fulcrum in a theatrical history of staging and thematising surveillance, extending from Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859) through Augusta Gregory’s Spreading the News (1904), to Enda Walsh’s Arlington (2016) and David Lloyd’s The Press (2009) and The Pact (2021). Surveillance agencies rely heavily on technology to gather information, but depend on human beings to store, order, and interpret it, and dramatic narratives exploit inconsistencies and injustices arising from slippages between data and its application. Boucicault, Gregory, Walsh, and Lloyd are counterpointed to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Catastrophe, and What Where, which theatricalise the structuring influence of monitoring and scrutiny on the texture of Irish social experience, personal and public. Once classified in an archive or record, or interpreted in policy and implemented in practice, ‘intelligence’ plays out less as a function of rigorous analysis than ideological determination.

Ranging across Beckett’s work before focusing, in particular, on the stories Malone tells in Malone Dies, I demonstrate the persistence of the emancipatory potential of sentimental fiction in this seemingly most anti-sentimental writer. Sympathy, for Joyce, held the promise of crossing class boundaries. Beckett, in contrast, reads class divisions as internal to the modern subject. Thus, the encounter between beggar and bourgeois that his work repeatedly stages – as in the structure of Molloy – is constitutive of capitalist modernity’s construction of subjectivity where freedom is always mediated by dispossession. Beckett’s subjects suffer alone. Seeing no way out of the infinite catastrophe his works present, Beckett nevertheless retains the possibility of human recognition. Sentimental fictions emerge, here, as one of the many conventions Beckett scrutinizes and inhabits, their persistence giving us an avenue into the history that has made its mark on his work, even as that work strives to efface its traces.

This chapter is a personal account of George Craig’s formation and experience as a translator, predominantly of Christiane Olivier and Samuel Beckett. Craig makes a case for a translator’s sensitivity to voice and tone, with the full aural dimension implied by these terms. In a time when talking about translation as collaboration is highly fashionable, Craig’s final essay before his passing in 2019 reminds us that translation can also be a solitary and highly singular activity that begins in the ear.

Starting with the observation that the word translation has its etymological roots, as does metaphor, in notions of space, this chapter attempts to revivify the relevance of the notion of space in translation, by relating it to the space that typically is occupied by textual editors. It takes the example principally of Samuel Beckett: looking at examples from his own translation practice as well as his attitudes towards that practice; looking at the work of scholarly editing that went into the four-volume edition of his letters; and questioning the role of the editor who has traditionally been seen as ideally invisible and authoritative. The various stages that go into the making of such an edition – transcription, translation, selection, annotation – are revealed to be reluctant to conform to the notional ideal of the editor’s transparency.

In this chapter, the author, as a psychiatrist who has written books on Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Samuel Beckett, both writers who push back the limits of literary writing, focuses on Beckett's change of literary language, not from the starting point of exophonic writing and self-translation, as most critics writing on Beckett’s bilingualism usually do, but ‘from underneath’, making this change of literary language appear as an apparent severing of links to continue writing on the ‘maternal side of language’. The author brings his specialist knowledge of adolescent care to bear on his subject and explodes some of the myths surrounding Beckett’s change of language, such as the famous ‘no style’ of French and the idea of a ‘counter-language’ to ward off the ‘(s)Mother tongue’. The author presents Beckett’s use of French as a paradoxically regressive move, which allows him to live ‘in exile within exile’, to set up the conditions of ‘nostalgia’ by putting the distance of the foreign language to the service of a risky regression to infancy in search of the body, in search of sensory perception and archaic aggressivity: a language ‘beyond the verb’.