Literature des Unworts

• Autores: Teresa Rosell Nicolas
• Localización: De fronteres i arts escèniques / coord. por Núria Santamaria, Francesc Foguet i Boreu, 2015, ISBN 978-84-943779-0-7, págs. 361-371
• Idioma: catalán
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• Resumen

  • Beckett’s writing resists and frustrates the attempts to decipher its symbols or provide satisfactory interpretations. Although he always insisted that he never conducted a theoretical reflection on his own work, the so-called «German Letter», dated 9 July 1937, is an explicit statement about his aesthetic theory. If one of the major literary currents of the twentieth century starts, precisely, with a letter, The Letter of Lord Chandos, in which Hofmannsthal advocates silence and recognises the crisis of language through the irreversible fracture of the relationship between words and the things they designate,Beckett’s programmatic letter, to which he would strictly adhere in later works, does the same. In this view, the word should be unmasked following the path of a literature Becket called «Literature des Unworts». This literature was liberated from the word and corresponded to a dismembered, dismantled and antirethorical dramaturgy based on the pure negativity of the word: literature falling silent. Beckett’s concepts of «memory» and lack of «experience» will be essential for the understanding of the conflicts in his texts and in the aesthetics of contemporary art. They will therefore, serve as the ground for a hermeneutic analysis tackling the demolition of expressive borders in the author’s practice, a practice focused on the inability to communicate experience — and History — through a story. Thus, the artist is active, but negatively, starting from the assumption of ignorance and the understanding of failure.