Beckett's Trilogy and the Limits of Self-Deconstruction

Ever since the seminal works of Hugh Kenner (1962), Ruby Cohn (1964), and other Beckett critics of the first generation, we have known about the richness in philosophical topics of Beckett's works and the manifold philosophical readings his texts purportedly lend themselves to. Among those, Beckett's association with existentialist thought has been perhaps the most persistent of all (see Esslin 1965, 4-10). In any case, Beckett criticism has tended to mirror the various twists, turns and crises of literary and philosophical theories of the past decades, responding to texts which "problematize the most basic concepts on which literary studies have been grounded and render them inoperative" (Fitch 1992, 126). It comes as no surprise, then, that ten years ago at the conference marking his 80th birthday, a "new Beckett" appeared once again, "thinkable only in the most recent terms" (Butler 1990, X). Beckett was discovered as a "poet of the poststructuralist age", as a "deconstructionist avant la lettre" (Butler 1990, X). Since then, his writings have been reread in the light of theories claiming textuality to supersede the subject,1 and a number of studies specifically on Beckett and Jacques Derrida's deconstruction have been published over the last years.2 Since Derrida has actually acknowledged his close affinity to Beckett's writings, nebulously finding him too close to write about (Derrida 1992, 60-62), this association seems to have somewhat ironically been granted authorization from the highest level. In short, linking Beckett to Deconstruction or Poststructuralism is not new. Well into the 1990s, moreover, Deconstruction seems on the wane, and as Steven Connor has suggested, its critical value to Beckett studies may legitimately be questioned. With its ever recurrent "denunciation of presence and logocentricity" (Connor 1992, 121), deconstruction has indeed tended to reproduce the same critical yield in spite of its proclaimed focus on the non-stability of textual meaning. Yet independent of the possible long-term critical sterility of Deconstruction, the affinity remains. It is between Beckett's insistence on the impossibility of a "true self, in particular as formulated in his trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (Beckett 1979), and Derrida's critique of the notion of self-presence of the subject (e.g., Derrida 1973; 1976). This affinity, however, needs revision. I suggest exploring it in both ways, for not only does Beckett's trilogy anticipate Derrida's