Extracts from 'R A N T S,' a series of reworkings of Samuel Becketts trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable.

Taking each of the novels’ pages, spreading them out on a ‘plane’ of text, short, incoherent and often non-syntactical text fragments are generated through the superimposition of horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines upon and across the mass of text, the diagonals cutting and breaking the progression of the text, the horizontal and vertical lines traversing its flow. The words transected by the lines are extracted from the text and form the basis the edits included in R A N T S. Printing different sequences and combinations of letters, words and fragments, and superimposing the print-outs in different variations, each page contains legible sections as well as abstract blocs, illegible superimposed layers, disintegrating letter sequences and movements that play between nonsensical disrepair and sections of fractured syntax.

Bearing in mind that Beckett’s writing itself flickers, makes obscure and traces the possibility of animating words as speech issuing from a body, this attempt at infusing his words with an excess that refuses to submit to signification, a kind of peculiar embodiment refusing to give in to the totalising logic of a transmission of original meaning, produces somewhat an intensification of what is already a particular and peculiar quality in Beckett’s work – its affective register; its minor, exilic qualities; its stuttering and stammering – a quality as frail as it is powerful; a borderline that exiles us from all possible meaning at the same time as it produces a germinal state where words link, mutate, and radicalize outside of their original narrative.

A version of R A N T S was performed as part of the Beckett & Company Centenary Conference at Tate Modern and Goldsmiths College, London, 2006. You can download an extract from a performance of the piece here. A manuscript is of the entire text is currently being passed around publishers. If you have questions or would like to know more about the piece, feel free to contact me on OLA(at)OLASTAHL.COM.