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Said is Missaid: Later Beckett, Earlier Wittgenstein

  1. Introduction

“Wittgenstein book safely arrived. Very glad to have it,” wrote Samuel Beckett in a New Year’s Day, 1971, letter to Mary Hutchinson, thanking her for securing him a copy of the German translation of Norman Malcolm’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir.[1] Eight years later, on January 15, 1979, in a letter written to his companion, Barbara Bray, Beckett again discloses that he is “reading the Wittgenstein with interest,” although this time with reference to Wittgenstein’s later work, Philosophical Investigations.[2] In this way, the philosophical texts concerning Wittgenstein in Beckett’s recently catalogued Paris library, write Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon, in their ravishing book, Samuel Beckett’s Library, show that Beckett “seems to have read Wittgenstein as a like-minded writer” from whom he could gain philosophical and literary encouragement.[3] Beckett’s exposure and interest in Wittgenstein’s earlier philosophy thus continued from the early 1950s until Beckett’s later years, as several scholars confirm.

Until recently, however, accounts of Samuel Beckett’s engagement with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s earlier philosophy have been necessarily conjectural. Yet, the catalog of Beckett’s private library, recently archived correspondence, and renewed scholarly attention confirm a high degree of exposure between the early work of Wittgenstein and the later work of Beckett, particularly with respect to Beckett’s “closed space” novels, including the eponymous Unnamable.[4] In fact, few authors are better represented in Beckett’s library, including six books by, and six books about, Wittgenstein, some of which contain Beckett’s puzzling annotations. These include, crucially, the 1960, multi-volume, Schriften, assembled by Beckett’s German publisher, Siegfried Unseld, containing the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Philosophical Investigations, Notebooks (1914-1916), and Philosophical Remarks, as well as Wittgenstein’s Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief, David Pole’s The Later Philosophy of Wittgenstein, and Bertrand Russell’s introduction to the Tractatus, complete with Beckett’s marginalia.[5] Beckett also owned and extensively annotated Rush Rhees’ Recollections of Wittgenstein and Paul Engelmann’s Letter’s From Ludwig Wittgenstein, with a Memoir. In fact, Beckett alludes to Rhees’ seminal text in his 1971 letter to Mary Hutchinson, referenced in the introduction to this work: “Wittgenstein book safely arrived. Very glad to have it.”[6]

In short, with specific attention to the contents of Beckett’s recently catalogued Paris library, as well as more recent scholarly contributions on the topic, this text will focus on related elements between Wittgenstein’s, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and Beckett’s, The Unnamable, in order to establish the particular resonance of Wittgenstein’s early treatment of ontology, ineffability, and solipsism on Beckett’s later work. 

Beginning with Wittgenstein’s premise that “the subject belongs not to the world but is a boundary of the world,” I will engage the idea, first, that Beckett’s narrator in The Unnamable is the neurotic representation of that boundary.[7] In this way, The Unnamable encloses speech, subject, and world in three bound, concentric circles, beyond which prevails silence. That is, by exploiting the proximity of speech and world in first-person narration in order to compound the self’s entanglement with language, silence becomes a kind of inaccessible utopia for Beckett’s narrator in The Unnamable.

Obviously, that Beckett assembled an impressive collection of books by and about Wittgenstein should come as no surprise: both employ similar situations, tropes, and linguistic concerns to comparable ends, including, for example, their respective treatments of meaning, failure, subjectivity, silence, and solipsism.[8] Thus, by attempting to prompt words closer to the limit of speech as a method of measuring the counterforce of silence, I will argue that Beckett reverberates the strategy of the Tractatus; and that the inaccessible, silent “utopia” of Beckett’s narrator in The Unnamable is, indeed, solipsism. For example, as Wittgenstein makes clear in the Tractatus:

Solipsism strictly carried out coincides with pure realism. The “I” in solipsism shrinks to an extensionless point and what remains is the reality coordinated with it.[9]

In what follows, then, I will attempt to show that the narrator of The Unnamable stands in relation to his own discourse in a similar way to Wittgenstein’s axioms in the Tractatus, a work whose main goal, according to the author, is essentially to nullify itself—that is, in Wittgenstein’s words, to “cast away the ladder.”[10] Beckett’s narrator, by this logic, becomes the unconquerable travesty of Wittgenstein’s “boundary of the world,” a subject whose domain is confined to the language that attempts to communicate beyond the margin it inscribes. In this way, “the search for the means to put an end to things, an end to speech, is what enables the discourse to continue,” as Beckett’s narrator confides in The Unnamable.[11] Finally, I conclude by positing that, for Beckett as for Wittgenstein, this is the role of art in the absence of a legitimate philosophical claim to speak on behalf of what lies over the frontier of speech. Beckett’s later, “closed space” art, on balance, offers not a projection of the ineffable but a systematic account of its seeming inviolability. In short, by drawing upon Wittgenstein’s earlier philosophy coupled with the evidence of his correspondence with Beckett, I ultimately show that Beckett’s later work—particularly with respect to The Unnamable and his other “closed space” novels—may be better grasped by examining a philosopher whose earlier concerns with language, arguably, were the inspiration for the latter’s subsequent artistic inventions.

2. Wittgenstein as Totem for Beckett

    Pause, and consider one of Wittgenstein’s more marvelous claims in the closing pages of the Tractatus. He writes:

    My propositions elucidate insofar as he who understands me recognizes them finally as senseless, when he has climbed through them—on them—over them. (He must, so to speak, cast away the ladder after he has climbed up on it.)[12]

    Obviously, the parallel between Wittgenstein’s pronouncement and the suggestive title of this essay—Said is Missaid—as Beckett confides in his 1981 novella, Worstward Ho, immediately suggests, to some extent, Beckett’s distinct interest in Wittgenstein’s earlier philosophy. “Said is missaid,” in either case, because, as Wittgenstein points out, “no proposition can say anything about itself, because the propositional sign cannot be contained in itself.”[13] That is, because “saying cannot say itself,” so to speak, the internal relation by which any given proposition represents something occurs prior to our experience of language, and thus cannot be represented by it.[14] Rather, it can only be demonstrated by the fact of our use of the proposition, through the formation of “pictures.”[15] For example, as Wittgenstein confided to a group of Cambridge students in 1930: “Language is connected with reality by picturing it, but that connection cannot be made in language, explained by language.”[16] To put it differently, in 1949, this time speaking to a class at Cornell University, Wittgenstein invoked the analogy of a map: “Now it’s as though everything on the map represents something,” he said, “but representing is not represented on the map.”[17] To this extent, for Wittgenstein and Beckett, it might be said that language confirms itself in everything that is while enjoying no technique for explaining how this is the case. I would suggest, crucially, that this is the precise concern motivating Beckett’s project in The Unnamable.

    To propose a second example, in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Remarks, another text that Beckett owned, Wittgenstein declares that “I cannot get beyond language by means of language,” suggesting that we are constituted by a language in which being cannot be affirmed.[18] For Beckett, in typically condensed style, this is fundamentally because “being is not syntactical,” as he confided to Ruby Cohn on the set of Waiting for Godot in 1975, before adding: “I don’t know any form that doesn’t shit on being in the most unbearable manner. Excuse my language!”[19] Likewise, the figure of Moran, in Beckett’s Molloy, signals the foundational claim at the core of Beckett’s later art—“all language is an excess of language”—a claim that, certainly, finds its source in Wittgenstein.[20]

    Of course, two notable reverberations follow from this premise: (1) that “reference” is displaced from “coincidence of name and object to agreement between parties on the use of an expression,” to borrow Furlani’s logic; and (2) that human problems are transferred from philosophy to “nondiscursive,” artistic forms.[21] In this way, for both Wittgenstein and Beckett, compositions of silence, really, (i.e. that which lies over the frontier of speech,) acknowledge that language ultimately cannot construct a domain of values. In a letter to Harold Pinter, for example, in response to Pinter’s 1969 play, Silence, Beckett writes: “I often wondered how it could be done, that speech overcome and the deep wounding played.”[22] By corollary, P.J. Murphy, for instance, working predominantly with Beckett’s Three Novels, including the eponymous Unnamable, posits that “Beckett’s abiding concern was for the problem of reference, of how language relates to reality, a question which was formerly the domain of the philosopher.”[23] That notwithstanding, this particular commitment to reference warrants further attention, both as it was conceived and later transformed by Wittgenstein, and artfully rendered by Beckett. 

    So, the Tractatus makes clear that, even if our language is foundationally vague and indefinite, it is nonetheless logically coherent and complete. In Philosophical Investigations, however, Wittgenstein abandons much of this foundationalist premise of logical symbolism for a new method of grammatical inquiry, where use, rather than foundational correlation, constitutes meaning, and thus where contextual setting, rather than dethatched signs and signifiers, is the supreme metric of language. That is, language functions in the Investigations within a larger nexus of performativity that Wittgenstein calls a “form of life—What has to be accepted, the given.”[24] Along these lines, Wittgenstein suggests that the referent essentially evades nomination but that any such conception of the problem of reference, even lacking a foundational system of logic, in fact, predetermines its availability and primacy. Wittgenstein thus ultimately refrains from the division of language and reference that, I would suggest, makes language autonomous and potentially open to new ontological realities, such as we find in Beckett.

    Obviously, with the Investigations, Wittgenstein essentially concludes that logical constants do not name substances, nor do logical propositions explain reality, since a proposition is, to the best of our knowledge, a sentence that is being used, rather than a name or linguistic denomination. To put it differently: “Only the proposition has sense; only in the context of a proposition has a name meaning.”[25] The essential requisite for making sense, thus, is the independence of a world demonstrating itself through the organization of symbols and symbolic systems. By extension, the internal association between terms is dependent on the external association between language and world, although one cannot, of course, engage the space outside of a system of representation to see either the world or the system itself. That, really, is Wittgenstein and Beckett’s shared problem, regardless of their respective methods of interpretation. Consider, for example, the following passage in Ingeborg Bachmann’s essay on the Tractatus, yet another text that Beckett owned and annotated. She writes:  

    What now is this unsayable? Is it first encountered as the impossibility of representing the logical form itself. This manifests itself. It is reflected in the sentence. The sentence points to it. What manifests itself cannot be said; it is the mystical. Here logic experiences its border, and as logic saturates the world, the world issuing in the structure of logical form, its border is the border of our world.[26]

    Like this, the Tractatus “makes ‘seen’ and ‘said’ coextensive,” based on Wittgenstein’s statement that “the borders of my language signify the borders of my world.”[27] Beckett, for his part, engages with this interchangeability in his “closed-space” works, particularly in The Unnamable. For example, in another letter to Barbara Bray, on December 21, 1962, Beckett writes that he was “reading Pole on Wittgenstein again,” which is to suggest that Beckett, at this point, in 1962, nine years after the completion of Three Novels, is nonetheless concerned with a scholar (Pole) who contrasts the insurmountable dualist picture of the mind as a cordoned-off space with Wittgenstein’s notion of a realm delimited by grammar.[28] I have called this the foundational claim at the heart of Beckett’s “closed space” art—namely, that logic is coextensive with language rather than established externally. On this score, Gary Kemp explains in broad strokes what Wittgenstein and Beckett saw as being fundamentally “wrong” with the dualistic conception of the mind, arguing that, for both, Cartesian Dualism was not simply a theory—an intelligible principle that might be refuted or overcome—but rather, a kind of phenomenological problem based on the idea of an image, or an accumulation of images, that are repeated to us ad infinitum if not distinctly by our language, then perhaps by our art, our concepts of religion, our ethics, and so forth. By corollary, based on the perpetuation of these repeated images, the overall picture must, in some way or another, be what Kemp calls “faithful—if not to our metaphysical situation, then to ourselves as we seem to ourselves, and thus to our phenomenological situation, to what it is like to be a conscious human being”[29]

    To this extent, by plausibly situating Cartesian Dualism along both phenomenological and theoretical contours, Kemp argues that, for Beckett and Wittgenstein, the problem (concerning our experience of dualism) cannot simply be eschewed by refutation or persuasion, but only by a systematic shift of “aspect”—that is, by “seeing things aright,” according to Wittgenstein, or by locating new modes of expression, literary techniques, images, and so on, as for Beckett.[30] In fact, the second animating dimension of Kemp’s article engages this point precisely. For both figures, the deepest philosophical problems are, indeed, inseparable from, or perhaps favorable to, questions of technique and literary form. In short, then, the literary becomes philosophical, the formal the substantial—and, finally, the distinction between the conceptual and the phenomenological becomes, more or less, malleable. For both, too, I would argue that this is the role of art in the absence of a legitimate philosophical claim to speak on behalf of what lies over the frontier of speech. Beckett’s later, “closed space” texts, on balance, offer not a projection of the ineffable but a systematic account of its seeming inviolability. By this logic, a work like The Unnamable may be better grasped by examining a philosopher (Wittgenstein) whose earlier concerns with language, arguably, were the inspiration for the Beckett’s later artistic inventions.

    At the same time, we should recall that Wittgenstein ultimately avoids, in Philosophical Investigations, the separation of language from reference that threatens to make language entirely autonomous and susceptible to new ontological realities, such as we potentially find in Beckett’s later work. Beckett, however, employs features of both the Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations, I submit, since he is ultimately able to capture the relationship between the central constraint of the Tractatus—that is, “the borders of my language signify the borders of my world”—and the use-based, ontological freedom of Philosophical Investigations. Beckett’s The Unnamable, in this way, manifests itself not as an exception to—but an example of—the very constraints and conditions of metaphysical knowledge. Thus, with Wittgenstein at the conceptual center, Beckett’s “closed space” literary system can be rudimentarily defined as follows: “All need to be known for say is known […] Closed space. Beyond the ditch there is nothing. This is known because it needs to be said.[31] Of course, we should immediately notice the vagueness surrounding the narrator’s obligation to speak, and that “seen” and “said” are essentially coextensive based on the prevailing Wittgensteinian premise: “the borders of my language signify the borders of my world.”[32]

    So, the logical space is not a deduced order of the world but a logical possibility yielded by the forms of representation we call upon. Beckett’s “closed space” texts thus reduce narrative time to points of linguistic space—which, like any point, occupy, at the same time—no space and as such are no thing, or nothing. Again, this is why the narrator of The Unnamable speaks of the vagaries surrounding his obligation to speak, and perhaps explains why Beckett’ rhetoric, whose formal dynamics will be assessed in what follows, intimates a metaphysical discourse that foregrounds “nothingness” as its subject and philosophical center. In this way, Beckett ultimately offers not a projection of the ineffable but a comprehensive interpretation of its experiential inviolability. But how does he manage to do so? To answer this with a sense of precision, consider the three basic premises established in Alva Noe’s Strange Tools. First, he supposes that, while art is not a technological practice, it presupposes such practices. Thus, because technologies organize our lives along contours that would make it basically impossible to imagine our lives in their absence, for Noe, it can be said that technologies make us who we are. Second, by corollary, works of art, really, are engagements with the ways in which our techniques and technologies organize and inevitably reorganize ourselves, suggesting that the true job of art is, indeed, philosophical. Finally, a third engaging idea in this work posits that art and philosophy—two distinct centers of organization and reorganization—are practices “bent on the invention of writing,” which, of course, has a great deal to do with biology and human nature, because “organization” is an inherently biological notion.[33] Strange Tools thus attempts to explain why some artworks prosper and others fail, depending on their method of organization. To this extent, Noe’s insights, perhaps, can be used to establish the particular resonance between Wittgenstein’s earlier treatment of ontology, ineffability, and solipsism on Beckett’s later, “closed space” art. 

    That notwithstanding, it should be noted that these “closed space” texts sometimes resulted in creative and literary dead-ends, which Beckett evidently performed himself into, given the nature of his task. However, in either case, we receive an account of the human inability to get outside the system of language—to break down the fourth wall, so to speak. For Gontarski, notably: “[Beckett’s closed-space texts] are an aesthetics of impoverishment, of apparent diminution, of subtraction that finally added up to some of the most carefully crafted and emotionally poignant tales of the late modernist period.”[34] In this way, the “closed space” in Beckett’s later art is exemplary of the internal associations that structure and form linguistic meaning. That is, the paradigmatic relation that generates meaning is, indeed, language—or, perhaps, Wittgenstein’s (later) notion of the “language-game”—which was intended to bring to light the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or a form of life. Furthermore, the limits of the expressible within a language-game, for Wittgenstein, are determined from within the system of language. As Hagberg notes, the language-game has particular repercussions for Wittgenstein’s concept of ineffability:

    The limits of the sayable are determined not by the imposition of some kind of external linguistic constraint or boundary but by the intrinsic reach of the collective possible moves in the game.[35]

    By most accounts, however, The Unnamable does not establish a complete “form of life”—that is, we receive no knowledge of social practices, methods of expression, rituals, and so forth. Rather, Beckett concerns himself wholly with the inability to get outside of linguistic structures in order to achieve silence—that is, the isolated reality of solipsism, which is external to all distinctive forms of life. Beckett’s narrator in The Unnamable, thus, is the neurotic representation of Wittgenstein’s boundary of the world, who, “[by] running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless.”[36] In this way, The Unnamable encloses speech, subject, and world in three bound, concentric circles, beyond which prevails silence. That is, by exploiting the proximity of speech and world in first-person narration in order to compound the self’s entanglement with language, silence, really, becomes a kind of inaccessible, solipsistic utopia for Beckett’s narrator in The Unnamable.

    In closing this section, then, I would like to briefly engage Wittgenstein and Beckett’s respective conceptions of solipsism. In Wittgenstein’s later work, including Philosophical Investigations, the logical space can be defined as follows:

    The world is determined by the facts and by these being all the facts. For the totality of facts determines what is the case as well as that is not the case. The facts in logical space are the world.[37]

    Like so, for Wittgenstein, outside the “closed space” of language, knowledge-based claims do not apply.[38] Of course, this is what Wittgenstein refers to as “the mystical”—and, considering Beckett’s interest in Russell’s commentary on this point in the introduction to the Tractatus, as well as Bachmann’s essay to that effect, it is clear enough that Beckett was notably absorbed with this particular discovery.[39] As Beckett saw it, however, the mystical realm is one that is permanently denied to us, given our organization by linguistic structures, and thus knowledge and uncertainty in his closed-space texts, as in the later Wittgenstein, “stand in an internal relation resting on an inherited background of belief that cannot itself be scrutinized because it constitutes the very ground of scrutiny,” to again borrow Furlani’s logic.[40] In this way, the Tractatus supplied Beckett with a persuasive model of the borders of our language, which, for the literary artist, revealed itself as a kind of unalterable problem. For Engelmann, crucially, in his Letters From Ludwig Wittgenstein, with a Memoir, (another critically annotated text in Beckett’s Paris library,) this is fundamentally because “Wittgenstein passionately believes that all that really matters in human life is precisely what, in his view, we must be silent about.” And that: “When he nevertheless takes immense pains to delimit the unimportant, it is not the coastline of that island which he is bent on surveying with such meticulous accuracy, but the boundary of the ocean.”[41]

    In sum, the notion that the sphere of mystical values is inexpressible but may manifest itself in what is spoken imbues art with significant import. The entire realm of transcendent values, by this logic, moves from the wandering propositions of philosophy into the sphere of art—that is, what cannot be compellingly said through philosophy may be communicated through art, and thus we may locate new philosophical implications and affective properties. Returning briefly to Bachmann’s essay on the Tractatus, for example, in a passage carefully marked by Beckett, she writes: “‘Sense,’ which must come from an explanation, is not in the world.”[42] Or, to put it differently, Howard Mounce notes that “there is no statement, distinct from others, that reveals it. Rather it shows itself in everything we say.”[43] In close, the Tractatus is an impeccable poetic manifestation of Wittgenstein’s belief that the job of philosophy is to highlight the inexpressible by signaling the boundary of the expressible.

    3. The Unnamable

      In what follows, beginning with Wittgenstein’s premise that “the subject belongs not to the world but is a boundary of the world,” I would like to engage the idea, first, that Beckett’s narrator in The Unnamable is the neurotic representation of that boundary.[44] To this extent, The Unnamable encloses speech, subject, and world in three bound, concentric circles, beyond which prevails silence. That is, by exploiting the proximity of speech and world in first-person narration in order to compound the self’s entanglement with language, silence becomes a kind of inaccessible utopia for Beckett’s narrator in The Unnamable. To put it differently, by attempting to prompt words closer to the limit of speech as a method of measuring the counterforce of silence, I submit that Beckett reverberates the strategy of the Tractatus; and that the silent “utopia” of Beckett’s narrator is, indeed, solipsism. Likewise, Beckett’s narrator quickly becomes the unconquerable travesty of Wittgenstein’s “boundary of the world,” a subject whose domain is confined to the language that attempts to communicate beyond the margin it inscribes. In this way, “the search for the means to put an end to things, an end to speech, is what enables the discourse to continue,” as Beckett’s narrator confides in The Unnamable.[45] Finally, I conclude by suggesting that, for Beckett and Wittgenstein, this is the role of art in the absence of a legitimate philosophical claim to speak on behalf of what lies over the frontier of speech. Beckett’s later, “closed space” texts, in essence, offer not a projection of the ineffable but a systematic account of its seeming inviolability.

      With this in mind, pause, and consider the following passage in The Unnamable: “It’s impossible that I should have a voice […] this voice that is not mine, but can only be mine.”[46] Along these lines, “voice” in Beckett’s “closed space” texts, including The Unnamable, I would suggest, is the heuristic that motivates linguistic performativity. The voice, of course, might be disembodied, or rendered infrequently, or it might echo other (real or fictive) performances, or even emanate from above or below. The implication, at any rate, is that Beckett’s treatment of voice, or voices, rather—each with its own volition and detachment from substance, presence, and materiality—is thus ultimately a fracture of the Cartesian foundation of subjectivity. For example, Beckett asserts this literary-philosophical mission as early as 1934, in his pseudonymous essay entitled, “Recent Irish Poetry,” published in the London-based journal, The Bookman.[47] Indeed, this was Beckett’s youthful attempt to assert a hard-nosed, modernist sensibility, even as, according to Gontarski, he was outgrowing it, “his development of voice its pedigree.”[48] Beckett thus attempts to brashly differentiate Irish poets by those who were aware of the “breakdown of the object, whether current, historical, mythical or spook; and [those who were] never at a loss to know when they are in the Presence, [who would] like this amended to the breakdown of the subject.”[49] In this way, demoted to its indispensable sound, the problem of voice can be narrowed to a search for: (1) “source,” the location of a particular voice; (2) “authenticity,” whether mystical or misbelief; (3) “significance,” as signaled by a dethatched, transcendent being or self-presence; and (4) “external,” as, say, a cultural echo.[50] In short, for Beckett, voice is not so much a spatial characteristic but a temporal movement or a sweep across moments. What is more, the very insolubility of these linguistic scenarios provided an important opportunity for analyzing the epistemological predicament at the heart of Beckett’s “closed space” texts. In the end, of course, after attempting to communicate beyond the margin it inscribes, as the subject disappears along with the body, what ultimately remains is its echo, its linguistic trace, its movement, its recording, and—yes—its voice.  

      4. Conclusion

        In sum, I have argued that, by analyzing and assessing Wittgenstein’s earlier philosophy, we arrive at a more complete understanding of Beckett’s later, “closed-space” art. I attempted to show that the Tractatus is an impeccable manifestation of Wittgenstein’s belief that the job of philosophy is to highlight the inexpressible by signaling the boundary of the expressible. Moreover, with specific attention to the contents of Beckett’s recently catalogued Paris library, as well as more recent scholarly contributions on the topic, I focused on related elements between Wittgenstein’s, Tractatus, and Beckett’s, The Unnamable, in order to establish the particular resonance of Wittgenstein’s early treatment of ontology, ineffability, and solipsism on Beckett’s later work. In this way, I suggested that The Unnamable encloses speech, subject, and world in three bound, concentric circles, beyond which prevails silence. That is, by exploiting the proximity of speech and world in first-person narration in order to compound the self’s entanglement with language, I have attempted to show that silence, really, becomes a kind of inaccessible utopia for Beckett’s narrator in The Unnamable. By corollary, I have concluded that this self-aspiring “utopia” of Beckett’s narrator is, naturally, solipsism, even if it ultimately cannot be realized by any one of Beckett’s voices. After that, I suggested that “voice” in Beckett’s “closed space” texts, including the eponymous Unnamable, is the heuristic that motivates linguistic performativity. In the end, Beckett’s later art becomes a way both to observe the budding of his own philosophical mind and the fruition of Wittgenstein’s earlier philosophical system in the Tractatus. Certainly, then, for Beckett as for Wittgenstein, we can reasonably conclude that, yes, “said is missaid.”[51] I submit, finally, that this is the role of art in the absence of a viable philosophical claim to speak on behalf of what lies over the frontier of speech.

        5. Bibliography

          Beckett, Samuel, and George Craig. The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume II, 1941-1956. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

          Beckett, Samuel, and George Craig. The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume III, 1966-1989. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

          Furlani, Andre. Beckett after Wittgenstein. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015.

          Furlani, Andre. "Earlier Wittgenstein, Later Beckett." Philosophy and Literature 39, no. 1 (2015): 64-86.

          Gary Kemp. "Autonomy and Privacy in Wittgenstein and Beckett." Philosophy and Literature 27, no. 1 (2003): 164-187.

          Gontarski, Stanley E. Beckett Matters: Essays on Beckett's Late Modernism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.

          Gontarski, Stanley E. The Beckett Critical Reader: Archives, Theories, and Translations. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012.

          Ingo Berensmeyer. "Twofold Vibration": Samuel Beckett's Laws of Form." Poetics Today 25, no. 3 (2004): 465-495.

          Perloff, Marjorie. Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

          Van Hulle, Dirk and Nixon, Mark. Samuel Beckett’s Library. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

          [1] Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1966-1989, 272.

          [2] Ibid., 481

          [3] Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon, Samuel Beckett’s Library, 7.

          [4] S.E. Gontarski, “The Conjuring of Something Out of Nothing: Beckett’s ‘Closed Space’ Novels,” 62.

          [5] Van Hulle and Nixon, 23.

          [6] Andre Furlani, “Earlier Wittgenstein, Later Beckett,” 67.

          [7] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philsophicus, 5.632.

          [8] Note: I limit myself in this essay to analyzing Beckett and Wittgenstein’s respective treatment of silence and solipsism, rather than meaning, failure, and subjectivity (although some overlap may occur).

          [9] Wittgenstein, 5.64.

          [10] Ibid., 6.54.

          [11] Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, 218.

          [12] Wittgenstein, 6.54.

          [13] Ibid., 3.332.

          [14] Furlani, 65.

          [15] See Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 2.17: “What the picture must have in common with reality in order to be able to represent it after its manner—rightly or falsely—is its form of representation. The picture, however, cannot represent its form of representation; it shows it forth.”

          [16] Furlani, 65.

          [17] Ibid., 65 (my emphasis).

          [18] Ibid., 66.

          [19] Furlani, Beckett After Wittgenstein, 21. Note: In his “Notes on Logic,” Wittgenstein writes that “mistrust of grammar is the first condition of philosophizing.” Notice the parallel between this quote and Beckett’s affirmation, “all language is an excess of language.”  

          [20] Ibid., 21

          [21] Furlani, Earlier Wittgenstein, Later Beckett, 67.

          [22] Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume III, 1966-1989, 158.

          [23] Jonathan Boulter. Beckett’s Dedalus: Dialogical Engagements with Joyce in Beckett’s Fiction, 123.

          [24] Furlani, 67.

          [25] Wittgenstein, 3.3 (my emphasis).

          [26] Sara Lennox, “Bachmann and Wittgenstein,” 239.

          [27] Wittgenstein, 5.6.

          [28] Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940, 211.

          [29] Gary Kemp, “Autonomy and Privacy in Wittgenstein and Beckett,” 165.

          [30] Ibid., 165.

          [31] S.E. Gontarski, “The Conjuring of Something Out of Nothing: Beckett’s ‘Closed Space’ Novels,” 73.

          [32] Wittgenstein, 3.3.

          [33] Alva Noe, Strange Tools, 4.

          [34] Gontarksi, 73.

          [35] Furlani, Beckett After Wittgenstein, 31.

          [36] Furlani, 31.

          [37] Wittgenstein, 1.11-1.13.

          [38] Furlani, Earlier Wittgenstein, Later Beckett, 70.

          [39] Wittgenstein, 6.522

          [40] Furlani, 70.

          [41] Ibid., 71.

          [42] Sara Lennox, “Bachmann and Wittgenstein,” 297.

          [43] Furlani, Beckett After Wittgenstein, 24.

          [44] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philsophicus, 5.632.

          [45] Beckett, The Unnamable, 218.

          [46] Beckett, 232.

          [47] S.E. Gontarski, “Beckett’s Voice(s), 21.

          [48] Ibid., 21.

          [49] Ibid., 21.

          [50] Ibid., 22.

          [51] Beckett, Worstward Ho, 21.