The Protruding Void: Mystical Affect in Samuel Beckett's Prose

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Taking as its impetus the droll remark made by Beckett in a 1937 letter to Mary Manning that he was in the process of creating "a mystical writing, so that the void may protrude like a hernia", this project seeks to understand Beckett's apophatic desire to strip away language, to poke holes or tear apart its arbitrary veil, as a desire to let this paradoxically fleshy, substantive void protrude through the threadbare linguistic surface; to be "let in" and given a form. Central to this thesis is the idea that this protruding void, that "something or nothing" at the core of Beckett's work after all representation and thematics have been stripped away, is akin to the mystical void of negative theology. Moreover, I wish to argue that Beckett's apophatic modernism not only anticipates postmodernism but also contemporary affect theory, in that his work achieves an expression of bodily life beyond logocentric representation into affective intensity. That is to say, this enigmatic void, which has been variously related to the crisis of modernity, the God-shaped hole at the centre of the existentialist universe, and the vacancy of the signified, is the both the root and the end of Beckett's aesthetics. Beckett seeks to give expression to a prepersonal and intrapersonal plane of affect, those sub-representational intensities which Blanchot called, in his review of L'Innommable, "that movement from which all books derive". It is a kind of khaos, like the ancient Greek primordial and disorderly void out of which springs creation, and which ultimately constitutes, I will argue, the precondition for both thought and life as such.