Samuel Beckett and the fantasy of lithic preservation

Abstract

Across his novels and shorter texts, Beckett engages frequently with forms of preservation fantasy: the belief that engraved language can extend an individual’s life beyond the biological limits of the body. I argue that Beckett uses the inscription of proper names to reimagine textual immortality as an inherently material desire. Vital to this inquiry is Michel Serres’s allotropic distinction between the hard and the soft [$\textit{le dur et le doux}$], anticipated in $\textit{Molloy}$. While the epitaphic tradition relies upon hard materials such as stone and metal to preserve lettering, Beckett’s interest in excrement (“First Love”) and mud ($\textit{How It Is}$) remaps inscription onto immanence. Rather than seeking immortality through lithic preservation, Beckett’s characters yearn to “return to the mineral state”, to have their bodies subsumed and dispersed throughout a greater container. Explicating Beckett’s material imagination reveals seldom considered source material including Frank Wedekind’s Lulu Cycle and biologist Ernst Haeckel’s theory of Urschleim.