Journal Article

On the Mortification of Novelistic Discourse in Three Novels

Murphet, Julian

2017

Overview

This paper argues for a specific labour of form in the so-called Trilogy , namely, the irreversible mortification of novelistic discourse. The great three-novel sequence is the literary space in which Beckett contrived to have done with his most dangerous temptations towards \"life and invention\", in and around the generic tar-pits of the comic novel. With implacable resolve, the author laid out before him the generic coordinates - novelistic narration; novelistic description; novelistic characterization; and the novelistic calibration of 'opinions' - only to take each to the internal limit of its humanistic delusion. The result is a leave-taking with a difference: not the sudden supersession or heroic vanquishing of 'novelism', but its laborious mortification, in order to immunise the promise of some form to come against the lingering infections of a now undead genre. Beckett's path through the novel was immanent, subjecting it to a process of degradation and internal dissolution, rather than attacking it through satire or side-stepping it altogether. The new form toward which he was reaching could only be attained through this patient and systematic dismantlement of the novel form from within its own coordinates. Reviewing the accelerating and metastasizing immanent critique from novel to novel in the Trilogy , this essay demonstrates how remorseless and logical it was, and how the momentum it gained served an aesthetic ambition that was also a biographical purgation: never again would Beckett attempt a novel. From this point forward, prose was liberated to serve non-novelistic ends.

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press,Edinburgh University Press Ltd
• Subject: Aesthetics / Beckett, Samuel (1906-1989) / Discourse analysis / Genre / Humor / Literary criticism / Literary Studies / Modernism / Novels / Prose / Social criticism & satire