Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret Reassesses Beckett's Late Works

Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret's essay "Beckett. L'imaginaire paradoxal" (Éditions Minard, Lettres modernes) argues that critics have neglected Samuel Beckett's later works, focusing instead on his early output. Gavard-Perret counters the notion that Beckett's shift from traditional genres like poetry, novels, and theater to film and television signals creative exhaustion. Through a thorough analysis of Beckett's entire corpus, he demonstrates that the paradoxical imagination of the author of "Molloy" finds its logical culmination in the ultra-brief forms of his final poems and television plays. The essay highlights Beckett's decisive language shift from English to French, citing a letter where Beckett announced his program to "discredit" his mother tongue and "drill holes in it" until what lies behind—whether something or nothing—seeps through. Gavard-Perret argues that this relentless pursuit of "something or nothing" is not nihilistic or depressive but a pure act of affirmation: "to see nothing to see better," "to say nothing to say better." The essay was published in artpress in May 2002.