After several walks in the fictional woods, instead of finding a path, we find ourselves completely lost. And the reason we got lost is Samuel Beckett's Texts for nothing. It is very difficult to give an interpretation to one of Beckett's texts because the equation that we are trying to solve has three terms: the writer, the work, and the reader. The reader has a very important role, because through him , the text gets a meaning, otherwise there are just some symbols lined up on paper. A text is not something like a document, or an essence with no relation with time, but it is more like a score, offering a different sound and resonance to each reading starting from the empiric reader, the professional one, up to the writer , who is also a reader. The text is like a machine who makes meanings, and these meanings, in modernism and especially in post-modernism are not fully reached because of a false synchronisation between scientific reading on one hand and literary language on the other hand, and also because of inadvertence. It is an inadvertence to read a post-modernist text like a, let say, a romantic one. And due to this different sound and resonance to each reading and reader, is difficult to talk about giving a valid interpretation to a text. Moreover, we think that Texts for nothing were not intended to be fully intelligible. Therefore, we find more appropriate to start our so called interpretation from an analysis of the text, based on a close reading, which hopefully will point out some images, elements or symbols, and make some light in this hard to understand and sometimes absurd universe of post-modern literary creation.
To begin with Texts for nothing1 is like a puzzle, and even if we put together all the pieces, the resulting image will be guiding us to a meaning that can never be fully reached and understood. In our opinion, the author uses this technique deliberately. He is not concerned if the reader manages to understand the text, because this text is not meant to delight or amuse the reader, but its purpose is to help the writer. The author does not write to be understood, he writes to understand. In other words, he appeals to literature because literature is a
particular and also privileged way of exploring reality. In this text, writing also appears like a healing act, through which the author is trying to save himself from disintegration, is trying to find a way out.
Secondly, the title is very interesting and certainly deserves our attention. Right from the beginning we can say, and we do not think that we are wrong, that there is more than just "nothing" in this text. Let's ask ourselves if we can change the term "nothing" with "something" and still have the same meaning that Beckett originally designed. As far as we are able to judge, such a substitution will bring a change in meaning. While "nothing " stands for incomplete, or more appropriate for infinite, "something" refers to precision, delimitation and motionless. "Nothing" can also suggest the idea of instability, heterogeneity, "something" is included in "nothing", because nothing can be the beginning of "something". It may sound a little strange , but to support this idea let's remember the biblical episode in which the world is made out of chaos, out of nothing : "And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep." (Genesis 1:2)
Also, by using the term "nothing", the author suggests a certain time and space, both of them being boundless. First of all it seems that the narrator has no perception of such an infinite time: "how long have I been here what a question I've often wondered", but how to answer such a question when everything seems to mingle?. In what concerns the space, the author introduces a symbol, the mountain, which can be associated with the idea of an ultimate truth, which the narrator is trying desperately to discover. But in order to reach this higher truth, the narrator has to go beyond some obstacles such as the mist, which obturates his view and shrouds the mountain, increasing its mystery. Another obstacle is his will, which seems to be suspended. The idea of a suspended will results from a series of thesis and antithesis: "I couldn't stay there and I couldn't go on , I should have begun, no, I had to begin , I could have stayed in my den, I couldn't ". The same idea is reflected in the refusal of the body :"I say to the body, up with you now, and I feel it struggling, struggling again till it gives up ".
In this text the narrator is engaged in a search of his own self. But this search fails because the relationship that the narrator has with himself is one of total alienation and therefore can no longer experience himself as being one : "we seem to be more than one". An identical attitude can be identified in his relationship with others, whose very existence he comes to deny: "who are these people anyway ?".
The fact that the narrator can no longer experience himself as being one suggests the idea of a disintegrated or a split personality. We have on one hand the conscious man and on the other hand the unconscious man, the rational man and the creative poet. This idea is supported with the following excerpt from the text : "I should turn away from the body, away from the head, let them work it out between them", where we think that body stands for the rational side and the head for the creative poet.
But the night will come and everything will change. The narrator seems to long for the night, it is for him like a way out of reality, and this escape is possible through literature, through writing. Rimbaud said once, speaking of the process of writing and the difference of the profound and empiric ego of the writer, he said : "quand j'ecri, je suis un outre " (when I write I am a different person). Maybe the same idea is in this text too. If we associate the night with inspiration , with a propitious moment for creating , we will understand differently the following excerpt : "yes, it will be night, the mist will clear […], I feel that other is coming, let it come, it won't catch me napping […] let's wait for the night".
The night does not come alone, it brings the silent too. Silent is a key word, not only in this text, but in all of Beckett's works, and is illustrated in a concept : "literature of silence". The entire text is strewed with "drops" of silence. To support this idea let's start from the fact that this text is a monologue, and not a dialog. Added to this we can find words that, through their meaning, suggest an atmosphere dominated by silence: the mist, the smoke, the graveyard, etc. All these words, in one way or the other, converge to the same idea.
In the end of the text we find an analepsis. The narrator remembers an old story told to him by his father, a story which "began unhappily, but ended happily" . The point of this analepsis in the text is to take the hero back in time to the innocent and ignorant age of childhood. The text is not a narrative but a metafictional writing, or even better, a series of self-interrogations, that the author is trying to answer "as best as he could".
We said in the beginning of this paper that this text is supposed to help the author, to offer him a way out of this post-modern hell, and let him search and reconcile with himself. Was this search a successful one? Did the text indeed helped the author? To all these questions only Samuel Beckett can answer.