Logical ethics

early Wittgenstein and Pynchon

pp. 17-46

in: Paul M. Eve, Pynchon and philosophy, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014

Abstract

In 1980, at the request of S.E. Gontarski, Samuel Beckett wrote Ohio Impromptu, a short piece of theatre featuring two doppelgängers seated opposite one another. In a clear-cut instance of nominative determinism, the figures are called Reader and Listener. However, superficially, the most striking aspect of this piece in relation to Pynchon's work is its potential for metatextual readings. Reader tells of a figure who has fled from the place where he used to live with his lover in an attempt to escape from his grief. At this new location a spectral figure appears who tells a 'sad tale" that comforts the figure. It is unclear whether Reader and Listener are the two figures in the frame narrative, but it is probable, thereby introducing strange loops at the extreme edge of limit-modernism. However, opening a metafictional floodgate in relation to Pynchon's fiction is not where this work begins. Instead, it is notable that Beckett's Reader repeats the line "little is left to tell" throughout the piece as the figures, or the characters in the tale, silently merge: "[w]ith never a word exchanged they grew to be as one".¹Ohio Impromptu is, as with much of Beckett's work, a piece concerned with silence. While the text gives a Pinteresque "Pause", the stage directions also explicitly frame "Silence. Five seconds' amid the final modulation of the sad tale wherein, at last, "[n]othing is left to tell".²