9. Beckett’s ‘Arabian Nights of the Mind’

This chapter aims to illustrate how a study of the surviving draft material can inform a narratological analysis of Beckett’s radio play Cascando (1961). It first discusses how its abandoned false start foregrounds notions like ‘narration’ and the ‘unnarratable’. Next, it argues that the genesis of Cascando is marked by a shift from ‘denarration’ to the more radical act of ‘denarrativisation’, which at the same time coincides with a transmedial shift from text or script to audio recording. Lastly, it adopts a more intertextual approach to explore how the radio play deals with ‘narrative closure’ in relation to the One Thousand and One Nights (also known as the Arabian Nights) and Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, two sources that Beckett was familiar with, as appears from his manuscripts, letters and library. The goal of the chapter is to demonstrate that genetic narratology can be applied not just to the ‘endogenesis’, but also the ‘exogenesis’ and ‘epigenesis’ of a literary work, i.e. its writing process, the external source material it uses, and its post-publication afterlife, which comprises translations in addition to revised editions. By combining these three levels, it becomes possible to understand how Beckett’s initial attempt to narrate the unnarratable gradually evolved, across versions, from a creative dead end into a never-ending story.