The “Rip Word” And Tattered Syntax: From “the word go” to “the word begone”

Abstract

Starting with a close analysis of Beckett’s “brotherly likes”, those seemingly infinite patterns of “generation and reproduction” that informs all of Beckett’s oeuvre, the essay examines Beckett’s “ronde syntaxique” (syntactic circle or syntactic round) and the close relationship between words and images in his work, as well as on his Ur-image of the clouds parting at sunset. This “introduces the new matter of loss, lessness, of a movement not in rounds but worstward, not Joyce’s ‘the seim anew’ but change, although for the worst”.