On the Rigorous Writing of Evil in Beckett and Sade

Abstract

This article aims to trace the echo of Sade in Beckett’s dealing with evil in Watt and The Unnamable. Mediated by translation and editorial projects, Beckett’s longstanding interest in Sade peaked in the postwar years, nurtured by his interest in the Sadean readings of Bataille and Blanchot, where the shade of the Holocaust looms large. The rigorous, almost implacable shape of Beckett’s novels and novellas found in Sade’s inquiry into evil a catalyst for the reconfiguration of language as vagrancy (the novellas), paralysis (Watt) or disintegration (The Unnamable). Confronted with Sade’s ruthless and numbing narratives, Beckett’s writing of evil will find in the voice a new organizing principle, profoundly indebted to his first experiments with the new media.