Vermicular Origins: The Creative Evolution of Samuel Beckett’s Worm’

摘要

On 12 August 1948, Samuel Beckett wrote to his friend the art critic Georges Duthuit,wondering where to find “the terms, the rhythms” (Letters 2: 102) necessary to go onwriting. In the same letter, Beckett describes how, while out walking that evening“among the dripping bracken,” he had decided:we need a motive to blow up all this dismal mixture. It is surely to besought where everything must be sought now, in the eternally larval, no,something else, in the courage of the imperfection of non-being too, inwhich we are intermittently assailed by the temptation still to be, a little,and the glory of having been a little, beneath an unforgettable sky. Yes, tobe sought in the impossibility of ever being wrong enough, of ever beingridiculous and defenceless enough. (102).