of Worstward Ho
by Samuel Beckett
"Briefly Noted" (March, 1984):
WORSTWARD HO, by Samuel Beckett (Grove; $8.95). These forty-one
small pages of very large type extend Beckett's wrestle with the void to the
point where less would be nothing. A personless voice, uttering words of
mostly one syllable in sentences of rarely more than five words, urges itself
onward in a dim but resistant realm where humanoid apparitions
fragmentarily loom and then fade. “So leastward on. So long as dim still.
Dim undimmed. Or dimmed to dimmer still. To dimmost dim. Leastmost in
dimmost dim. Unworsenable worst.” The dim shapes in this environment
most minimal are called shades, and we probably would not be entirely
wrong to think of it as an old-fashioned Hades that ends in new-style
entropy. (“Vast apart. At bounds of boundless void. Whence no farther.”) A
sterile, dreadful exercise, it might be said, and one does not, as Dr. Johnson
remarked of "Paradise Lost," wish it longer than it is. And yet, the words—“How almost true they sometimes almost ring! How wanting in inanity!”
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