Texts for Nothing and Other Shorter Prose 1950-1976

by Samuel Beckett, Mark Nixon (Editor)

This is the last of three volumes of collected shorter prose to be published in the Faber edition of the works of Samuel Beckett which already includes a volume of early stories (The Expelled/The Calmative/The End/First Love) and of late stories (Company/Ill Seen Ill Said/Worstward Ho/Stirrings Still). The present volume contains all of the short fictions some of them no longer than a page written and published by Beckett between 1950 and the early 1970s.

Most were written in French, and they mostly belong within three loose sequences: Texts for Nothing, Fizzles and Residua.

The edition also includes two remarkable independent narratives: From an Abandoned Work and As The Story Was Told. All of these texts, whose unsleeping subject is themselves, demonstrate that the short story is one of the recurrent modes of Becketts imagination, and occasions some of his greatest works.

...he would like it to be my fault that words fail him, of course words fail him. He tells his story every five minuts, saying it is not his, there's cleverness for you. He would like it to be my fault that he has no story, of course he has no story, that's no reason for trying to foist one on me...

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Novels of Samuel Barclay Beckett, Irish writer, include Murphy in 1938 and Malone Dies in 1951; a wider audience know his absurdist plays, such as Waiting for Godot in 1952 and Krapp's Last Tape in 1959, and he won the Nobel Prize of 1969 for literature.

Samuel Barclay Beckett, an avant-garde theater director and poet, lived in France for most of his adult life. He used English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black gallows humor.

People regard most influence of Samuel Barclay Beckett of the 20th century. James Augustine Aloysius Joyce strongly influenced him, whom people consider as one modernist. People sometimes consider him as an inspiration to many later first postmodernists. He is one of the key in what Martin Esslin called the "theater of the absurd". His later career worked with increasing minimalism.

People awarded Samuel Barclay Beckett "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation".

In 1984, people elected Samuel Barclay Bennett as Saoi of Aosdána.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bitesize Beckett for the squeamish. The ‘Texts for Nothing’ continue Sam’s obssesion with first-person nameless clueless narrators exploring a claustrophobic space while hardcore tripping on unreliable memories. ‘Enough’ is a rare female-narrated text from Sam including some sinister sexual stuff amid the usual elliptical prose. Stories ‘All Strange Away’ and ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’ are in his challenging ‘scientific’ mode, stripped of the usual melodic bounce and moments of lucid beauty found in the others, and are less interesting on the whole. That mode is represented here in the ‘Fizzles’, five shorts that condense some of the magic found in his longer prose and theatre works, and ‘Lessness’ is the most stunning transition between these two modes: a feat of incredible musical writing with increasingly powerful repetitions. ‘The Lost Ones’ is from an abandoned novel (most of the works here are abandoned): Beckett chose to outline the lives of little people living inside a cylinder. Proof that even geniuses have moments of clueless lunacy. These Faber & Faber reprints stike a balance between welcoming the new reader and pleasing the scholars.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought I'd read some more Beckett prose before I picked up my next Lee Child, and that worked well, some real reading before mindless relaxation, like moving from porridge to Co-Co Pops.
Texts for Nothing is a ragbag, pieces from here and there, doubts whether they were ready for publication or published correctly. Beckett was moving away from prose to concentrate on his drama. This apparent uncertainty of purpose adds to the usual broth of wandering, ranting, pointless circuits and dubious existence.
The pieces start off where the Trilogy stopped, with some beautiful, stripped to the bones, very short texts around Unnamable/ Malone existential states. The middle pieces are some curious, geometric hells, the Lost Ones in particular a Dantëan community of searchers, climbers and vanquished. The later pieces, "Fizzles", well, fizzle out.
The language, the reading, is of course wonderful. With Beckett, like Jimi Hendrix, you are always aware that you are experiencing the ultimate creative work. His countless imitators are apparent on every page, but never detract from the unique experience of reading Beckett.
I'll need to get on to Worstward Ho sometime, but in the meantime I wonder what Jack Reacher is getting up to?

[Max Nemtsov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Потрясающе, конечно, то, что еще до Нобеля Бекетт этими текстами _зарабатывал_, то есть, как минимум три издательства это публиковали в трех странах, ссорились за них между собой, его герметичные стихи в прозе и монологи требовали у издателей читатели. ХХ век был поистине веком высокой литературы (не в СССР, разумеется). Сейчас такое уже невозможно. Бекетт просто бы не выжил, пошел бы преподавать, наверное и тихо загнулся в рощах акадэма.

[Alex · Rating 2 out of 5]

I tried, I really did, but I just didn't 'get' it.

I shall be sticking to his drama in future.

[Kol · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love you so much Beckett. I wish I could share my love for him with my year 8 English Teacher who would never stop talking about him, but 14 year old me could not have been less interested if I tried

[Descending Angel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A range of texts, from short prose pieces, short stories and abandoned fragments of a would be novel. Not must have, but Interesting and challenging stuff. Highlights ~ "From An Abandoned Work" "Enough" "The Lost Ones" and "Fizzles".

[Astrid · Rating 3 out of 5]

this is basically beckett being extremely beckett-esque. so if you're a fan, just go for it; otherwise, you've been warned.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ahh, Beckett, how I love thee.
This volume of writings is quite incredible, and thoroughly enjoyable, if at times rather tough reading. The Preface gives a bit of background to eacch work, which I found illuminating. It is often hard to place a Beckett work in time, considering the many editions and translations at hand. We also are able to glimpse his mindset, of sorts, to further elucidate the often dense prose.
Texts For Nothing: As if! Nothing Becket writes is for nothing. These are intriguing texts, as they show us Beckett trying to move on from his earlier work in the novels.
From An Abandoned Work: This one left me to wonder if Beckett was yet unable or unwilling to let go of the novel form. Still, it was abandoned.
Faux Departs: A fragment that returns in a later work, sort of.
All Strange Away: Rather bleak, unsurprisingly. Mathematically precise in parts, which I find in many of Beckett's prose pieces. Strange, that.
Imagination Dead Imagine: Fragment of an earlier and later work, partly. More of Beckett experimenting with spaces, bodies.
Enough: I found this a tad disturbing in content, which is rare fo me reading Beckett. Personal, even?
The Lost Ones: An odd prose piece, quite long, and the precursor to "Ping". Another work initially abandoned, then finished. Mostly.
Ping: A fine-tuning of "The Lost Ones", and quite incredible.
Lessness: The story was included in a book of short stories under the title Friendship launched in 1990 to coincide with the fourth anniversary of the kidnapping in Beirut of the British television journalist John McCarthy. When read in this light, the piece takes on quite the dark visage.
Fizzles: I enjoyed these, as they have many of the hallmarks of the almost metronomic writing style Beckett masters. Once you find the word-pace they are amazingly hypnotic.
As The Story Was Told: Written as part of a memorial volume for a poet, Günter Eich. Stark, sad. Surprised? Thought not.
Le Falaise/The Cliff & neither: ostensibly poetic pieces, though not always noted as such. Just examples of Beckett being Beckett.
Sounds & Still 3: both of these are textual fragments used/discarded by Beckett when writing the Fizzle entitled "Still". I LOVED these pieces.
Maybe more for the Beckett aficionado than the casual Beckett reader, if there are any of those? As always, extremely highly recommended. Gives one a wander around and about the mindset of a literary giant.

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Suddenly, no, at last, long last, I couldn't any more, I couldn't go on. Someone said, You can't stay here. I couldn't stay there and I couldn't go on.” Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing and other shorter prose, 1950-1976, collects a great deal of the short, largely abandoned works he’d set his sights on in the years after he finished writing The Unnameable in 1950, the final novel in his Trilogy. Given the way his Trilogy famously “proceeds by way of collapse” (Kunkel), it is not surprising that his later prose works seem to be part of a wider, endless effort to devolve the written word somehow, to take written language to its final frontiers. This collection starts with the thirteen brilliant ‘Texts For Nothing’, which I first encountered in Lisa Dwan’s thrilling stage adaptation ‘No’s Knife’ at the Old Vic in 2016; in these pieces, Beckett’s preoccupation is made so vividly clear. “Yes, there are moments, like this moment, when I seem almost restored to the feasible. Then it goes, all goes, and I'm far again, with a far story again, I wait for me afar for my story to begin, to end, and again this voice cannot be mine. That's where I'd go, if I could go, that's who I'd be, if I could be.” The subsequent pieces are similarly written and oriented: in ‘The Lost Ones’, Beckett writes, “So on infinitely until towards the unthinkable end if this notion is maintained a last body of all by feeble fits and starts is searching still. There is nothing at first sight to distinguish him from the others dead still where they stand or sit in abandonment beyond recall.” And his signature chiaroscuro is no less present, from the dark humour of ‘From An Abandoned Work’, to ‘Faux Départs’ insistent call to “Imagine light. Imagine light.”

[Jess · Rating 5 out of 5]

these abandoned works by beckett proved to illuminate his prowess through his entire oeuvre—bleak philosophy, stream-of-consciousness, anthropological perview of everyday living in a cynical aspect. "The Lost Ones" as an example, mapped like Bernhard's Concrete, a seemingly structural world objected through the funnel of a cylinder (the abode), light,walls, and its vivid description of other aspects that Beckett connects to the predicament of life in a philosophical way. This is a new style of Beckett I have never seen and thus very intrigued, with its somehow considerably structured society lies his prominent bleak philosophy throughout — abode being a version of hell, and the references to The Divine Comedy as Dante is mentioned. A birdhole view from the Abode that preaches a deeper analysis of human condition; seeks to probe with the fragments that Beckett outlines and its repetitiveness that candor to Beckett's liminal imagery— absurdist, hellish without the flashiest demons and flames that sparks the story; breaking a conventional plot Beckett has always been doing—the flames and demons are those within our psyche. Perhaps its abandonment realises something that can't be ever compared to Bernhard's Concrete that lies a more perfected finale: The Lost Ones seemingly errs abundantly in the intricate description of mise en scene and less of the humanistic, dreadful abjection of self that he typically writes of. Despite so, other works like "Ping" that is also seen in First Love and Other Stories, as well as "Fizzles", "All Strange Away" and "Sounds and Stills" that is very prominent of Beckett-esque oeuvre. Loved this book.

[Sanjuro · Rating 3 out of 5]

An odd collection. The kind of stuff most writers would never publish. Notes and scraps, a collection of failed ideas and false starts, the makings of possible stories which never got off the ground. Most of them a few pages in length, some upwards of 20 pages, only 3 or 4 with enough ideas to give the reader a proper sense of where Beckett may have taken them if he'd been able to move them forward. It felt largely like reading various microcosmic failed expressions of what worked for Beckett when he wrote The Unnamable. Rhythmic prose texts with thoughts and repetitions which lost momentum. A few of the texts were interesting, and one in particular (Texts for Nothing IV) which contributes a lot to the myth-making of his novels, but overall an exercise for Beckett completists like myself. Parsing the intention of most of these texts is virtually impossible.

[Aryeh Lederhendler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jesus this was a slog. No reflection on the writing -- this was visceral poetry -- but it was also really fringe, weird prose. There are sort of fever-dream versions of "characters", "settings", and "plots", but that's all you get as a reader.
These shadows carry the heaviest burdens of atmosphere, physicality, and emotion. You cannot remain untouched by this stuff.
The writing inhabits a liminal space between poetry, theatre instructions, prose, I guess, and art in its most general sense.
Highly experimental.
He writes directly to your subconscious, painting vivid images in your foggy depths.

[Sunblinding · Rating 4 out of 5]

No comment.

[jamie · Rating 4 out of 5]

whatever!

[Kleiner Spion · Rating 5 out of 5]

lähmend/ beeindruckend (stunning)

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Getting more and more excited to do my dissertation on Becket...

[swodder · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not sure I was always fully aware of what was going on with a lot of these texts but the rhythm and the imagery make them worthwhile all the same. I've seen some performed on stage a couple of times, which I would well recommend if people get the opportunity.

Best read out loud.