The Matter of Beckett's Facts

An important part of Beckett's engagement with the matter-of-factness of modern everyday life is the literal concern in his writing with matters of fact. The collection and exchange of atomised facts has become part of the ordinary texture of social life, in modern societies in which facts are both abundantly available and provide everyday discourse with calming lubrication. It is clear from Beckett's notebooks that he had an Autolycean appetite for striking trifles of knowledge. The essay discusses examples of natural knowledge and medical fact in Beckett's writing, along with the names which erupt with juddering specificity into the generalised, frequentative world of repeated actions and nameless entities. The essay argues that, if facts provide meditative consolation, they can also enact something of the aggressive-defensive dissolution of connections identified in W.R. Bion's concept of ‘attacks on linking’. Where for Roland Barthes, arbitrary facts enact a reality effect, giving a legitimating and luxurious kind of surplus to the act of signification, facts in Beckett evoke the capacity of unintelligible ordinariness to interrupt the play of meaning-making. The essay concludes that matters of fact in Beckett are therefore at once mundane and exotic, signalling the insignificant universality of facticity.