Friday April 6th   15:30   Greenberg Room

Ann Banfield

University of Calfornia, Berkeley

Tattered Syntaxes: Beckett's Late Style

Samuel Beckett's oeuvre remains one of the last productions of literary modernism, resisting all attempts at recuperation by its recalcitrant strangeness. It provides a counter-example to the received idea that each successive style that initially puzzles by its difficulty finally ceases to shock. Beckett's work was preceded by one presenting an equal though not the same strangeness: Finnegans Wake. The difference between Joyce and himself, Beckett once explained, is that Joyce tended "toward omniscience" whereas he worked with "ignorance". The language of Finnegans Wake is the language of a knower; Beckett's minimalist language is that of a "non-knower, a non-can-er", in a quite precise linguistic sense. Beckett and Joyce each exploited a different component of the grammar, specifically of the lexicon, the one aiming at maximal production and in the other at minimal. Joyce's route was lexical and Beckett's syntactic. Hugh Kenner makes the distinction between "a word-man or a sentence-man". Taking "word" in its literal sense as the productive, lexical word, Joyce's was a "Revolution of the word," as Eugene Jolas put it. "Joyce's repertory of syntactic devices is not extensive", Kenner observes. "He is not, like Beckett, an Eiffel nor a Calder of the sentence. The single word—'repaired'; 'salubrious'—is his normal means to his characteristic effects." Kenner's insight only goes so far. It is not that Beckett was an architect of the sentence. Beckett called his the "literature of the unword." He spoke of "tattered syntaxes," "scraps of an ancient voice in me not mine". Fragments of syntax, but well-formed fragments, syntactic structures—phrasal categories, maximal projections.

A more precise formulation of Kenner's distinction is given by X-Bar Syntax, together with Emonds' version of the division between lexical words and grammatical formatives: Dictionary and "Syntacticon." The latter includes not just functional categories and bound morphemes but a non-productive set of grammatical nouns, verbs and adjectives. Syntacticon items map into the skeleton of X-Bar Syntax, where the basic and largest syntactic units (the highest, maximal projections) are phrasal categories in general., of which the sentence is only one actualization. Beckett intuits this leveling of the sentence to the structure of all major phrasal categories as XP. Wakese uses the generative processes for the production of new lexical items. Phonology, morphology and etymology underlie its lexical inventiveness. Emonds' Dictionary is the interface with non-linguistic memory and culture; its members have full semantic features. Hence Joyce's "omniscience". The young Beckett imitated but ultimately resisted Joyce's productivity as a gift inherited against his will—"what a gazeteer I am", the Unnamable jests.

Beckett's late style is created largely out of the Syntacticon, while scarcely exploiting the Dictionary. Because it is language's relation to Kant's synthetic a priori, the Syntacticon is the source for the philosophical vocabulary. This explains the perceived philosophical quality of Beckett's work. Its abstractness lies in the fact that Syntacticon items have only syntactic or cognitive features. The "philosophy" that emerges from it is grounded in Beckett's exploitation of syntacticon items such as quantifiers, especially the comparative, and directional prepositions, especially the intransitive Ps he brought to the fore in his returns to English, the philosophy of a directionality or "path" without movement, heading in a lesswards or worstward direction: "stirring still" ever less and less but always just short of nothing.