The Interruption of Writing in Molloy. Sundoy Visits from Porlock Yael Levin The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Histories are founded on difference. Neoclassicism offers restraint where the Renaissance celebrates openness; Modernism’s distorting mirror held up to nature is the fragmented evolution of the Romantics’ Aeolian harp. Projects of historical revisionism often undermine such conventions of separation by emphasizing likeness. Such a critical trend is noted in re cent treatments of Beckett’s work and its telling correspondences with Romantic poetics. Dirk Van Hulle’s and Mark Nixon’s “All Sturm and No Drang”: Beckett and Romanticism, offers a representative example in its attendance to a host of Romantic topoi and the manner in which they are picked up by the Irish writer, beyond and in contradistinction to the commonplaces of the epochal divide. The present article intervenes in what is already a complex conflation of critical cliches, on the one hand, and their transformative subversions, on the other. It aims to signpost both the conventional and the more re cent approaches to Beckett’s debt to the Romantics while offering an alternative, third approach that resuscitates an essential philosophical difference. Such difference, it will be claimed, hinges on the figure of in terruption. Molloy's uncanny revisitation of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” will be brought in evidence to demonstrate that the Romantic/Modernist divide may be traced in the shift from interruption as a figure for cessa tion to interruption as a creative outset. In “Failure and Tradition: Coleridge / Beckett,” Paul Lawley suggests that to read Beckett through Coleridge is to contemplate afresh the Art of Failure and to situate it within a Romantic tradition of creativity as implicitly problematic rather than to accept Beck ett’s own account of it as an ab contrario personal reflex from Joycean lit erary omnicompetence. This tradition is one in which specifically artistic impotence or blockage inevitably takes on larger resonances because of the centrality of creativity to being as such. (42) Lawley’s reading offers two significant insights. First, he suggests that though it is often seen as definitive of Beckett’s poetics, the so-called “art Pa r t ia l A nswer s 14/2: 255-273 © 2016 Johns Hopkins University Press