« neither ». Spectres sonores de Samuel Beckett

Explicitly problematizing the relationship between music and literature, Samuel Beckett’s Words and Music and Cascando are exemplary instances of intermediality, but only if we grasp this concept as a tool that helps us better understand the spectrality and neutrality that lie at the core of Beckett’s poetics. The encounter between music and literature in these two radio plays is therefore a means of rendering paradoxically audible a ghostly absence, an aesthetic “hauntology” () that lies neither here nor there. This unceasing hesitation nonetheless calls for a decision beyond the neuter (): language or music; this or that? Such is the impossible task at play in Cascando and Words and Music, as well as in the rest of Beckett’s œuvre: letting the neuter be while still shaping (musical) movement.