This article will trace the origins of the “eternally larval” in Beckett’s writing, arguing that the author’s fascination with incipient life forms is reflected in the vermicular modalities of his post-war prose, and is bound up with his attempts to evolve a new form of literary representation. Readers of Beckett have already established that his knowledge of invertebrate life partly derived from his reading of entomological texts. Angela Moorjani detects an echo of Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Life of the Bee (1901), which documents his experiences of beekeeping, in Beckett’s description of the hum of Moran’s hive in his 1951 novel Molloy (165). James Carney concurs with Moorjani that Beckett may also have been alluding to the work of the German ethologist Karl Von Frisch in the 1940s on the dance of the honeybee, concluding that: “Beckett’s work is informed, at least partially, by a remarkably prescient awareness of contemporary entomology” (230). More generally, Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon have identified a number of well-thumbed works of biology and natural history in Beckett’s surviving library. In addition to Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), Beckett also owned a number of fin-de-siècle works of evolutionary biology, including Ernst Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe (1899), and Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1907), the latter of which influenced a number of other modernist writers. Beckett was particularly drawn to the parts of these texts that focus on the larval stage of an insect’s development, characterized by Darwin as the “first condition of an insect at its issuing from the egg” (447).
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