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9 Decomposition: L, M, S The task of finding a form that could accommodate chaos is defined by Evelyne Grossman as “[é]crire la décomposition pour se fondre enfin dans la poussière des mots” (1998: 46). The “dust of the words” is more or less what Beckett entered in the margin of the bilingual (English/German) edition of Eh Joe used by Rick Cluchey: “Den[n] du bist Erde und sollst zu Erde werden (Luther)” (RUL MS 3626),1 related to the line “Mud thou art.” The German equivalent, “Dreck bist du,” is followed by a note indicating the source: “Genesis III 19” (RUL MS 3626). The King James Version of the Bible reads: “for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” The semantic complex of “dust,” “mud,” and “Dreck” (including the connotation of excrements à la Shem the Penman) is Beckett’s version of the stuff that men are made of. By means of a small change to this key motto (memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris) used on Ash Wednesday to remind Christians of their mortality, Beckett draws attention to the creative potential of decomposition. LARGE: “World Stuff” The question of creation, which is so central in Beckett’s work, is related not only to Genesis, but also to the key issue of pre-Socratic philosophy. As the early philosophy notes on the pre-Socratics2 illustrate, Beckett’s “work in regress” started from the big picture: the “cosmic matter,” or the “Weltstoff,” as Wilhelm Windelband called it: “Fundamental question of science: What is the Weltstoff! That this single cosmic matter lies at the basis of the entire process of nature was a self-evident presupposition of Ionic School” (TCD MS 10967/5). Among the ideas of one of these Ionic philosophers, Beckett found a variation on the “dust thou art” motif by Anaximander: “All things must in equity again decline into that whence they have their origin” (TCD MS 10967/7). The “world stuff” (10967/9), according to Anaximander, was “infinity”: “Character of ‘infinity’ formulated by Anaximander as indispensable to weltstoff, as a finite weltstoff would exhaust itself in ceaseless Decomposition: L, M, S / 163 succession of productions” (10967/7). This ceaseless process was crucial in Heraclitus’s idea of the “world stuff”: “not substance or matter, but motion, the cosmic process, Becoming itself” (10967/24v). The lasting effect of these ideas on Beckett’s career as a writer would become apparent a half century later when he wrote the short text The Way (1981), consisting of two sections, respectively preceded by a Möbius strip or infinity sign in two different positions ( ∞ ): The way wound up from foot to top and thence on down another way. On back down. The ways crossed midway more and less. (. . .) the one way back was on an on was always back. To the first draft, Beckett has added the note: “The two ways were one way” (HRHRC), which reads as an echo of an aphorism by Heraclitus, paraphrased by John Burnet (Greek Philosophy, Part I: Thales to Plato, 1914) and excerpted by Beckett in his philosophy notes: “The ‘way up’ (earth - water - fire) and ‘way down’ (fire - water - earth) are one and the same” (TCD MS 10967/26v).3 Beckett’s fascination for the “primacy of flux” (10967/24r) would make him another “proustite,” or worshipper of the “Great God Flux,” according to Wyndham Lewis. Beckett’s interest in the pre-Socratics is undoubtedly related to their quest for the Weltstoff, but it is important to note his interest in the philosophers who combined different substances and had a more complex idea of the primal matter. The problem with the early pre-Socratics’ philosophical methods is their reductive approach. Gradually the pre-Socratics realized that the world’s genesis could not be reduced to a single primal substance. By analogy, the Beckettian universe cannot be reduced to a basic set of source texts, and genetic criticism is not limited to source hunting. Beckett has collected, recollected, and combined these notes with other reading notes, and in order to study the dynamics of the writing process, it is not enough to follow it upstream to discover a few sources; it is also necessary to follow the “flux” downstream. The pre-Socratics reappear in 1935 in a set of notes on the Trauma of Birth by Otto Rank—another thinker who tended to reduce the complexity of the (psychic) world to one single source. Rank suggests that human...

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