Habitable Spaces, Havens of Hope

The possibility, if not the necessity, of Beckett’s post-war shift from English to French is evident even as early as Dream of Fair to Middling Women , in which Belacqua reflects that ‘Perhaps only the French language can give you the thing you want’ ( DF 48). Far harder to predict, however, would have been the no less important, if similarly intermittent, generic shift from prose to drama that occurs in the late 1940s and continues almost to the end of Beckett’s writing life. For, although his experimentation with the dramatic genre precedes this post-war efflorescence—there is, for instance, the short dramatic fragment Human Wishes (written in 1940) 1 —Beckett himself explained the writing of Waiting for Godot (1953) as a reaction to, more precisely a flight from, the writing of the prose trilogy. What drama seemed to promise him was what he terms a ‘habitable space’ beyond the ‘complete disintegration’ of the first person singular that is enacted in the ‘wasteland of prose’ and that reaches some kind of limit in the Texts for Nothing . 2