“ALL KNOWN – NEVER SEEN”: Susan Howe, Samuel Beckett and an Indeterminate Tradition

This paper offers a comparative examination of the work of Samuel Beckett and Susan Howe. It begins by outlining the current critical orthodoxy that has allowed them to be compared as writers of the "postmodern", an orthodoxy exemplified in the work of Marjorie Perloff, one of the most prominent figures writing on the twentieth century avant-garde. This paper argues that the individual literary aspirations of Beckett and Howe actually resist the assumptions contained within this tradition. I compare the complications of understanding reference and representation in Howe's most recent work, Pierce-Arrow, and in Beckett's post-trilogy prose. I explicate the apparent similarities in this work's explorations of the limitations of the sign, and examine the startling interrogation of the relationship between the linguistic and the phenemonological offered by each writer. I then suggest that this apparently shared concern with the phenomenological actually conceals significant differences about the way in which each writer imagines meaning.