Samuel Beckett´s poetics offers a paradoxical fusion of the compulsion to write and an inability to do so. Such a slippage from inspiration to expiration is in many ways definitive of twentieth-century thought on writing and subjectivity. Fraught with an obsessive preoccupation with the obligation to write, Molloy houses a crew of agents whose sole purpose is to impress this obligation upon two rather unwilling protagonists. This paper argues that the novel’s self-reflexive preoccupation with writing is symptomatic of a late modernist suspicion of discrete and independent authorship. In an attempt to tease out the fluid conceptualizations of writing and subjectivity as they emerge in the text, these figures of imposition are read alongside Coleridge’s preface to “Kubla Khan,” a literary antecedent that haunts the novel. The paper suggests that the evolution from a Romantic to a Modernist conceptualization of inspiration hinges on the figure of interruption. If the anxiety that riddles Coleridge´s preface is brought on by the inevitable cessation of writing as epitomized in the “person from Porlock,” Molloy  demonstrates that writing is interruption; it is a doing and undoing of the subject within the endlessly circulating language of a poststructuralist intertext. Beckett´s reworking of Coleridge´s anecdote unfolds as a transgressive and generative exploration of subjectivity that is inseparable from the novel´s thematization of writing: the subject is both agent and receptacle of the writing that generates him. Turning to the work of Maurice Blanchot and Gilles Deleuze, the paper concludes by considering a writing that exceeds subjectivity and leads beyond dialectics, beyond ontology. 

Yael Levin is Senior Lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her work on Joseph Conrad has appeared in Conradiana, The Conradian, Partial Answers, Secret Sharers (2011) Each Other's Yarns (2013) and her book, Tracing the Aesthetic Principle in Conrad's Novels (Palgrave Macmillan 2008). She is currently working on The Interruption of Writing, a book that traces the evolution of models of textual production and creative agency from Romanticism to the Digital Age.

(updated January 2016)

Yael Levin is Senior Lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her work on Joseph Conrad has appeared in Conradiana, The Conradian, Partial Answers, Secret Sharers (2011) Each Other's Yarns (2013) and her book, Tracing the Aesthetic Principle in Conrad's Novels (Palgrave Macmillan 2008). She is currently working on The Interruption of Writing, a book that traces the evolution of models of textual production and creative agency from Romanticism to the Digital Age.

updated January 2016

Literary undertakings of the Faust legend have traditionally associated the fate of the overreacher with a thematized fragmentation. On the level of plot, Faust is torn limb from limb or threatened to be thus handled by a devilish cohort; stylistically, the tight drama that unfolds in the protagonist’s study spirals into a disjointed account of royal courts and sidekick pranks. In John Banville’s Mefisto this fragmentation is articulated in intertextual links that open up the text to a rich anteriority. Signification is consequently produced both horizontally and vertically, both inside and outside the novel. This paper traces the antecedents of the Faustian intertexts present in the novel and test the effects of such accumulation on the practice of hermeneutic deciphering. It shows that Banville’s intertextuality itself functions as a Mephistophilian figure, a playful abundance that creates an obstacle for interpretation. Such a stylized chaos does not allow for a teleological reshuffling or re-ordering of the text into a meaningful and cohesive pattern. The reader, then, is enjoined not to re-order the text but to performatively re-enact it, a creative process that will have us thinking not inside but outside the hermeneutic circle.

The volcanic eruption that occurred in Pompeii almost two millennia ago and the city’s more recent excavation have fuelled the literary imaginations of many great thinkers. This paper examines the evolutions of the motif in the Twentieth Century, through the inter and intratextual meeting of Joseph Conrad’s The Arrow of Gold, Sigmund Freud’s “Jensen’s Gradiva and Other Stories” and Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever. The treatment of the Pompeiian motif in these texts suggests that the themes of mourning and loss that inevitably color the tragic event are coupled by themes of desire, longing and hope. The latter are incited precisely where loss has been fixed, and the lost object can no longer be resurrected or found. For Conrad, the Pompeiian image signals a recurring theme of unrequited yearning or impossible love. Consummation is deferred or impeded, eliciting both the protagonist’s and the reader’s desire. Freud describes the manner in which the motif of Pompeii is emblematic of his notion of repression, where the latent exerts its power over the manifest. However, where Conrad delights in delay, Freud expounds the psychoanalytic drive to unmask and recover. In Derrida’s reading, the Pompeiian motif is likened to the figure of the archive which is not only responsible for the preservation of memory, but is also a dynamic force that forms its content as it comes into being. In opposition to Freud, the emphasis is placed not on the past but on the future, on the singular experience of the promise. Although this recalls Conrad’s temporality of deferral, here the promise is not ironized by an underlying impossibility but rather suffused with hope. The juxtaposition of the three writers thus testifies to the paradoxical fusion that lies at the heart of the ancient site. At once past and present, the image of Pompeii endures in the imagination as an object of desire, a figure that can never be possessed.