Abstract

In Samuel Beckett's Stirrings Still, typical of his late work, there is a deliberate poverty of expression. Seen on a continuum, the late work perpetuates while simultaneously condensing the rhetorical excess of the early work, such as the trilogy, which took language almost to the threshold of exhaustion. The economic perspective of the late work thus demands a reevaluation of the previous work and its reception. The deliberate inadequacy of the late work constitutes an aesthetic that works to undermine the tenets of traditional criticism and render them inapplicable. Beckett's late work has often been perceived as the distillation of a vision, despite the fact that it gestures to its position as a residue or remainder of questionable aesthetic--and ethical--value. The absence of an unequivocal relation between the subject and the object produces an art obliged to pursue its own worthlessness. The unstable and unequal relationship between the subject and object is never resolved by Beckett's work, and its value is always shadowed by uncertainty. The challenge of Beckett's late work lies in what value, if any, can be drawn from it.