On the Sphere, the Cylinder and the Cuboid: Closed System Dynamics in Various Published Fictions and Beckett’s Late Prose Works

Okotie, S. (2025) On the Sphere, the Cylinder and the Cuboid: Closed System Dynamics in Various Published Fictions and Beckett’s Late Prose Works. PhD thesis, University of Reading. doi: 10.48683/1926.00129795

Abstract/Summary

In his introduction to Samuel Beckett’s Nohow On, S. E. Gontarski identifies ‘a new character, the nameless “him”’ – or on occasion “her,” “one,” or “it” – as ‘Beckett’s second major fictional innovation’, the first being that of “voice”: the ‘progressive disintegration of literary character that dominated the journey fictions from Watt…’ The transition from the latter to the former ‘was announced in the fragments and faux départs that eventually developed into All Strange Away’, and is encapsulated in the latter’s sixth and seventh sentences: ‘Out of the door and down the road in the old hat and coat like after the war, no, not that again. Five foot square, six high, no way in, none out, try for him there.’ This and related texts appear to depict what A. A. Luce, Beckett’s personal tutor at Trinity College Dublin, refers to as ‘artificially closed system[s] like those postulated by science’. While Beckett scholars tend to associate the term ‘closed system’ with thermodynamics, an additional, unexplored avenue has the potential to open up further interpretative dimensions for this important preoccupation in Beckett’s work: that of classical mechanics – a subject Beckett studied as an undergraduate at Trinity. Indeed, the texts’ three-dimensional spaces correlate with the three most common coordinate systems within classical mechanics – the Cartesian, cylindrical and spherical – and the geometry of ‘the Pantheon of Rome’ referred to in All Strange Away brings to mind Archimedes’ On the Sphere and the Cylinder, whose theorems were themselves conceived of as problems of mechanics. My affinity with these stories derives from my own training in classical mechanics. The research presented in this thesis has helped me clarify aspects of my approach to His Enclosure – my novelin-progress – and its predecessors. It has also opened up a critical distance between my closed system texts and those of Beckett.

Additional Information	Redacted version - some parts have been removed for copyright reasons.
Item Type	Thesis (PhD)
URI	https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/id/eprint/129795
Identification Number/DOI	10.48683/1926.00129795
Divisions	Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Literature and Languages > English Literature
Additional Information	Redacted version - some parts have been removed for copyright reasons.
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