Inventeurs ou administrateurs de créatures? Les narrateurs de Samuel Beckett

Abstract

The article presents an analysis of the roles of the creator and of imagination in the work of Samuel Beckett. It begins by a study of the short novel Company/ Compagnie (1980), written in English and translated by the author into French. The analysis is built on the perspective of énonciation in linguistics, which allows a consideration of the subjects of speech. In addition, a bilingual reading of Beckett’s short novel is proposed, from which a character/ creator in the entre-deux emerges, presenting himself both as an inventor and as a sort of administrator of creatures who exist in spite of him. The article thus examines how the narrator of Company and those of other Beckett’s texts put the Author in a delicate position: they trouble the notions of origin and originality of a text, stressing its plurality and at the same time evoking the ancient idea of inventio in rhetoric.