Exacerbations and the Question of Remains

Beckett may have turned to drama in search of a ‘habitable space’ beyond what he had come to see as the ‘wasteland of prose’, but he did not simply abandon prose writing altogether, even in the wake of the Texts for Nothing , which he was quick to dismiss as a failed attempt ‘to get out of the attitude of disintegration’. 1 The next major prose work after the Texts for Nothing is How It Is (1961), 2 identified on the cover of the French edition as a ‘novel’ ( roman ). While How It Is may bear little resemblance to anything that precedes it in that most accommodating of genres, it might be argued that Beckett’s text is in fact all the more a novel for that very reason, given that the term ‘novel’ itself suggests novelty. Of more significance, perhaps, is the fact that in the last of the thirteen Texts for Nothing the expression ‘c’est du roman’ (translated by Beckett as ‘that’s romancing’) means error, or what in How It Is is rather more harshly dismissed as ‘all balls’ ( de la foutaise ). In short, if, as the cover of the French edition suggests, How It Is is indeed a roman , then the very possibility of treating error merely as one of its themes is placed in question before we have even turned to the first page of the text itself, where the attempt to distinguish what is truth from what is ‘all balls’ is not simply thematized but enacted.