Our collaborator Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret publishes a book “Beckett – Extinctions” at the Éditions Douro, Chaumont. Here’s how he presents it:
Beckett: what happens or the death of words and images
This essay expresses the rut which in Beckett springs from the impossibility of retaining anything. The fear of the void, the impossibility of saying and representing becomes the necessary extinguishing of a light until the moment of absolute destitution. Here we are in In the breathlessness of living, the breathlessness of words and images: the being is thrown into the world without any longer understanding the presence of oneself, of others.
There is, to use a title from Beckett, the “How to say” but also the how to show. In the novel, the theater, the poetry and the pieces for television, there continues a race for words, for images in a flow and above all a completed syncopation. The same hesitations suspended in the meaning which becomes asphyxiating, end up where the word is doomed to the invisible, the image to extinction.
Beckett has exhausted all possibilities. What escapes emerges and wanders in the impossible of saying, of seeing excluded in the face of the calamity of too much. The Beckettian characters dissolve, sinking into nothingness, into the shifting sands of their imagination and into the wanderings of their thoughts.
Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret
Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret, “Beckett – Extinctions”
Editions Douro, Chaumont
September 2024, 70 p., 12 Euros.
https://www.editionsdouro.fr/Jean-Paul-Gavard-Perret
