Beckett’s self-translations, as we have seen, involve a shift away from the baroque flourishes and ‘exuberances’ of Irish English in order to allow for a change in style. Something had to be destroyed in order for expression, or rather the necessary non-expression of expression, to be accessed; as seen throughout his post-war work in relation to narrative, character and form. This is not merely a refusal of identification in a Brechtian sense, but also in the ways in which Beckett’s pathways between French and English are, like Cornelia Parker’s work, an explosive obliteration of a monumental originary text. Through the demands of defamiliarisation, something might be re-formed and re-presented, in such a way that the bare bones can be revealed.
The last word to Malone:
What I sought…was the rapture of vertigo, the letting go, the fall, the gulf, the relapse into darkness, to nothingness, to earnestness, to home …
(Beckett, 1951 [1955]: 189)