‘Ecosophy’, Anti-literature and Ecological Entropy in Samuel Beckett’s “Nohow On” - Rahil Dellali

Most of the modern and postmodern literary productions flaunt obdurate images of death and disintegration, where nature, both as a space and place, is reduced to a mere emptied site. Samuel Beckett’s fiction falls more within the ‘anti-literature’ and absurdist travails whose comic cruelty surpasses the relief that natural images provide. In Beckett’s Endgame play, the characters entertain the ideas that “there’s no more nature”, and that “the earth is extinguished”. In Waiting for Godot, the earth is referred to as “the abode of stones”. Inspired by Felix Guttari’s ‘ecosophical’ theory of the three ecologies (environment, society, and subjectivity), this paper is an ecocritical reading of Beckett’s collection of three prose pieces entitled Nohow On (1989). Nature, like Beckett’s characters in this collection, is mostly anonymous; it is equally silenced and hardly depictable especially in the first piece entitled Company and the last one entitled Worstward Ho. The story in the middle is entitled Ill Seen Ill Said where the pronouncement that there’s “No more sky or earth” is made; it is a pure parody of nature through the withering life of an unnamed old woman. In Nohow On, nature is reduced to absence. It is intentionally eliminated into static silence to serve the rather decaying parodies of its existence.