In One Ear and Out the Others: Beckett. . . . Mahon. Muldoon

Critical attention to the Beckettian poetics of silence and babble is divided between French modernists, who hear Beckettian silence and babble as a function of the metaphysics of absence (Bataille), and Irish modernists, who hear Beckettian silence and babble as a function of the politics of presence (W.J. McCormack). This article bridges such critical divisions by proposing a typology of Beckettian modes of listening: listening as a mode of poetic attention to the murmurs of voices which can no longer, or not yet, be fully apprehended (voices caught between the extremes of silence and noise, between absolute absence and full presence). Listening would not only be fundamental to the genealogy of Irish poetics that runs from the bilingual Beckett to his not entirely monolingual successors, Derek Mahon and Paul Muldoon, but fundamental to the critical genealogy that runs from the modernism of Bataille to the post-modern poetics of Jean-Luc Nancy.