Writing influenced
by Beckett

Beckett is the influence that justifies the extreme end of the Tumbleweed Words compression project. He demonstrated that a complete human world — with suffering, comedy, hope, and futility — can be created from a very small number of words, provided those words are chosen with absolute precision. His later work is the furthest point on a line that starts with Chekhov and runs through Carver and Hempel: the place where the story has been reduced to its irreducible minimum, and then reduced again.

Compression as philosophy

Beckett’s compression is not primarily a formal preference. It is a philosophical position. He wrote in French to slow himself down, to prevent the English language’s facility from carrying him past the point of necessity. He then translated himself back into English, choosing the word that was most exact rather than the word that was most natural. The result is a prose that feels both spare and inevitable: as if the words that are there are the only words that could be there.

This is compression at the level of ontology, not style. Every word that remains in a late Beckett text is there because its removal would remove something that cannot be replaced. The test for flash fiction: can this word be removed? If the answer is yes, remove it. If the answer is no, examine why. The why is usually the story.

The prose poems, “Texts for Nothing,” “Company,” “Ill Seen Ill Said”: these are the formal achievements that most directly inform the compression project on this site. They are not minimalist in the sense of being empty. They are minimalist in the sense of being full to the point of collapse. Every line carries the maximum load.

Failure as form

“Fail again. Fail better.” This is Beckett’s most cited line and his most misunderstood one. It is not a motivational statement. It is a description of the Beckett project: the attempt to say the unsayable, which will always fail, which failure is the only honest record of what it is to be a mind reaching for language that is not adequate to experience. The failure is the work. The attempt is the thing.

Flash fiction can use this. The story that does not arrive at its subject. The story that circles what cannot be said. The story whose ending is the recognition that there is no ending adequate to what the story is about. These are not failures of craft. They are the craft at its most honest.

“The Unnamable” ends, or does not end, with: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” This is the Beckett position: the continuation in spite of the impossibility of continuation. Flash fiction can embody this in miniature. The piece that reaches the limit of what can be said and then says one more thing. The extra thing is everything.

Dark comedy

Beckett is funny. This is easy to forget if you have only read about him. Vladimir and Estragon’s vaudeville routines. The slapstick of the falling bodies in the novels. The jokes that are jokes and also descriptions of suffering. The humour does not soften the bleakness. It sharpens it. Comedy is Beckett’s way of taking suffering seriously without turning it into tragedy, which would make it too coherent, too dignified.

The flash fiction lesson: comedy and darkness are not opposites. The funny moment is often the most precise account of the unbearable. The laugh that stops before it resolves into something comfortable. Beckett worked this out in a tradition that runs from music hall to existentialism, and the result is a register that flash fiction can use: the story that makes you laugh and then leaves you in the dark.

The tone is the key. Beckett’s comic register is not irony, which keeps its distance from its subject. It is something more uncomfortable: the recognition that the situation is both absurd and entirely serious, simultaneously. This is the register most useful for flash fiction that wants to write about suffering without sentimentality.

What Beckett teaches flash fiction writers

Reduce until reduction is impossible, then reduce again. Trust failure as a formal position. Use comedy to access darkness without sentimentalising it. Know that the characters who wait, who talk while they wait, who are talking as a form of waiting: this is also what the best flash fiction does. The language is the situation. The situation is the language.

Read these first:

“Beckett’s characters wait. They talk while they wait. The talking is not about the waiting. The talking is the waiting. This is also what the best flash fiction does.”

— David, Tumbleweed Words