The Unnamable

“I can’t go on. / I’ll go on.”

Beckett ends the final book in his Trilogy by reminding us that words, and nothing else, have brought us to the end of the story. “You must say words, as long as there are any.” Implicit in this command is the possibility that the words—the right words, the words worth saying—may run out. And so The Unnamable leaves us with the last provocation of modernism: to find new language, and to utter it.

Many writers—most, even—are content to circulate within the well-mapped territory. They are happy to utter what Donald Davidson called “dead metaphors” and to accept awards for doing so.

This series of interviews is devoted to those writers who seek, through the medium of their work, to go on, precisely when they can’t go on. This is a question of transcending limitations; simple to pose, difficult to answer. But one’s reach should exceed one’s grasp, as Browning had it.