By Amjad AlShalan
In this brief piece, I seek to offer a side of the reception of one of Beckett’s writings that is not often stressed in Beckett’s scholarship: the reception of his texts from a Saudi perspective. Throughout my PhD years, I was frequently asked how I came to know about Beckett after learning that I was from Saudi Arabia. If I may say so, the common misconception seems to be that there are no readers of English literature in Saudi Arabia since one cannot equate Saudi Arabia with English fluency. This brief reflective piece will discuss the initial view of ‘Worstward Ho’ made by Saudi students, how they approached it, and their perception of it. The aim is to shed light on the fascinating influence Beckett’s work has on the Saudi reader, who is schooled from an early age to seek a literal meaning in any English text.
The students were initially intimidated when they recognized it was a prose work written by Samuel Beckett because they had previously imagined he only wrote one or two plays. Beckett is widely regarded as the author of Waiting for Godot in the region, and I rarely encounter a Saudi reader who has read his trilogy or poetry (I attribute this to the fact that just a few of his works have been translated into Arabic until recently). Not to mention that many English literature-based modules do not include his non-theatrical work on the syllabus unless the professor is a Beckett expert. As a result, students’ exposure to his work was confined to select theatrical works, prompting me to introduce them to brief non-theatrical pieces in order for them to learn how to approach and assess his non-theatrical work.
When I first asked, ‘How long did you think Beckett took to write it?’ Their response was, ‘It is either too long or too short,’ but when I asked again, ‘What time do you give its process of creation based on its value?’ Some said a week, while others said a month. So they were surprised to learn that he took seven months to complete the first draft. That was a good starting point to alert them to the tentative nature of Beckett’s writing process. To guide their critical assessment and make the text more approachable, I presented seven studies on the text published between 1988 and 2022. The inclusion of the text in disability studies challenged their critical interpretation, revealing one facet of their critical literary limitation: they struggled to connect disability to his writings. One reason for this is that they have been trained to analyze literary texts in such a way that they approach them with the intent of extracting literal meaning rather than experiencing a meaningful interpretation.
The students’ first impression was that the text was confusing, and they focused on the linguistic elements by remarking on sentence structure and other details (their safe zone). During our conversation, it became clear that the students had distanced themselves from the metaphorical meaning and were creating walls as a result of the fragmented sentences and images of interruption present in the text. They echoed words discovered in a quick Google search for Beckett, such as ‘existentialist’ and ‘dismal’, without identifying particular thematic or metaphorical instances from the text. Their dread of Beckett appears to have hindered them from reading and enjoying the work. When I asked them to investigate the work from which the title is drawn, they did not connect Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! with Beckett’s ‘Worstward Ho’. They drew some connections between the words ‘west’ and ‘worst’, which appear in the title, in order to project a greater meaning into the text without referencing Kingsley’s work. They resisted making sense of the writing, believing it to be a jumble of meaningless words produced by an ‘insane’ narrator. They simply emphasized the repetition of specific phrases, structures, and imagery, to enforce a nihilistic theme, portray a psychological struggle, or just produce a style reminiscent of his theatrical work.
The most surprising reaction from them was when I mentioned the possibility of the narrator being blind or partially blind, which made them realize they didn’t really get the connection between Beckett’s and Kingsley’s texts, despite the fact that they all highlighted the references to eyes and the inability to see clearly, as if they dehumanized the narrator and the text simply because they did not feel comfortable enough reading a fragmented sentence structure. The language and imagery employed throughout the narrative frequently created a sense of gloom and a lack of visual input, adding to the notion that the narrator is blind. The narrator’s struggle to move forward, despite seemingly insurmountable barriers and the certainty of failure, reflects humanity’s ongoing search for meaning in a world devoid of intrinsic purpose. This demonstrates another facet of their critical limitation: their inability to interpret the authorial intention behind literary works. They approach literary materials individually and inside an isolated framework of references, so they devote all of their energy to making meaning of a single piece.
After our active reading session, they were questioned again about their interpretation of the text, which extended to include its deeper insight into the depths of the human condition, removing layers of language and narrative to reveal the bare core of existence. After being introduced to the concept of blindness, students regarded the narrative’s broken shape as a fractured state of consciousness. It did, in fact, challenge their typical analytical approach, which is based on a literal reading of the text, when presented with a complicated network of metaphors. They could not discover a valid purpose for the repetition or fragmented patterns, which contradicted their knowledge of proper English sentence structure. Some even disputed how a Nobel Prize-winning author could have written with such a fractured sentence pattern. The discussion of disability allowed them to separate themselves from the sentences linguistically and to be approached metaphorically to depict the difficulties of having a disability. They were even confident enough to suggest a reason for such a structure, stating that Beckett may have intended to disorient the reader and immerse them in the chaotic nature of the narrator’s anxiety. Overall, their responses indicate that Beckett’s ‘Worstward Ho’ is regarded as a linguistically innovative and austere work that engages with themes of embodied subjectivity and identity construction, serving as a summative reflection on his intellectual work, while also challenging traditional symbolism and engaging in a radical literary experiment to achieve a ‘literature of the unword’. Despite using references to the abstract nature of his narrative, they were unable to produce a meaningful reading of the text on their first attempt because they were unable to find a meaning for each sentence they read. However, the more they discussed his writing, the more they became acquainted with the sensation of reading the ‘literature of the unword’ and how the goal is not to locate meaning, but to have a meaningless experience that is representative of the human predicament.
Amjad AlShalan is an assistant professor at King Saud University. She specializes in Samuel Beckett, and her research interests cover the Saudi reader, archival studies, visual analysis within literary criticism, modern and contemporary theatre among others.
The Beckett Review 
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