1 DEATHLY CONSTRUCTIONS/ BECKETT’S THANATOGRAPHIES Garin Dowd Keynote address to the conference ‘Beckett and Death, Dying and all that other unfinished business’ held at University of Northampton, December 3 rd 2006 (c) 2006 Garin Dowd This paper examines the significance of what I propose to give the name ‘deathly constructions’ in Beckett’s oeuvre. This facet of his work may also be thought of as ‘thanatographic’, deathly writing. Speculating that there may be a thanatographic ‘system’ which can be discerned in operation to varying extents throughout his work, it is, however, the specific ambition of the intervention to locate this deathly network within two related conceptual frameworks. The first is provided by the theme of construction itself, the second by the investment Beckett’s work abundantly displays in a thinking of the ruin (and of various modes of fragmentation, devastation and corruption) and in particular in its synecdochal form, the stone, or stones. Beckett’s thanatographic compositional imagination is part of a larger engagement with questions of topography on the one hand and architecture on the other. [From this it is possible to map Beckett’s deathly constructions on to geopolitical concerns which may impinge on the way in which his work can be and has been inscribed often either in an Irish cultural or a continental European avant-garde context. It is suggested that an attention to Beckett’s thanatographic imaginary renders the work less susceptible to being ‘arrested’ within either context.] While far from clearing the way for a return to the narrative of the work as testifying to the human condition in its finitude, or to a contemporary legacy – albeit much skewed - of such a conception in Badiou’s ‘courage’, Beckett’s deathly constructions, and the memorial edifices, compositions, and structures which are so frequent in his corpus, are indicative of what I propose to call an ‘atopian threshold’ which is neither purgatorial, nihilistic nor signposted the via negativa in a mystical effigy of redemption. Through an attention to the role of the contour, the surface and the ‘interface’ (textual and architectural threshold) of subject and construction (or abode, shell, niche, grave), it is suggested that the continuum between ‘inert’ matter and the human life form is an abiding one in Beckett’s work, such that it is possible to make an PDF created with pdfFactory Pro trial version www.pdffactory.com