Language a veil that must be torn apart to get at the things or nothingness behind it.

Beckett wrote in a letter (in German he was poly lingual)  '...my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it.'

And in a legacy to other authors he bequeathes

Grammar and Style - to me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit.
 A mask. Let us hope the time  will come...when language is not most efficiently used but most efficiently...misused.

 Language is a cultural construct...and no one from Jonathan Swift (or even from Edmund Spenser) came to see it as natural.  Is the English language (or any language) a plague that has bee inflicted upon us?

It is deeply ironic that we love words (some of us)  for their beauty and fragility, but knowing, too, a contempt for them and a need to search beyond them for what they will not disclose.

 The fate of the Irishman becomes the fate of all mankind: alone, lost, in search of some whole, unbroken place which might have existed in the past, which will perhaps be possible in the future in a personal and intimate way, but which will probably not be possible at all

In Ireland,  literature and its language was a  desire to move the populace rather than seize the citadel, an activity which needed the power of songs and stories to thrive.

Yet Beckett writes with startling beauty;

The mind, dim and hushed like a sick-room, like a chapelle ardente, thronged with shades; the mind at last its own asylum, disinterested, indifferent, its miserable erethisms and discriminations and futile sallies suppressed; the mind suddenly reprieved, ceasing to be an annex of the restless body, the glare of understanding switched off. The lids of the hard aching mind close, there is suddenly gloom in the mind; not sleep, not yet, nor dream, with its sweats and terrors, but a waking ultra-cerebral obscurity, thronged with grey angels.

For the reader who believes that Beckett’s need to write in French came through necessity, as a result of writing a good deal in English, this passage comes as a small shock:

The writing of, say, Racine or Malherbe, perpendicular, diamante, is pitted, is it not, and sprigged with sparkles; the flints and pebbles are there, no end of humble tags and commonplaces. They have no style, they write without style, do they not, they give you the phrase, the sparkle, the precious margaret. Perhaps only the French can do it. Perhaps only the French language can give you the thing you want.

And the narrator writes about his fiction: ‘The experience of my reader shall be between the phrases, in the silence communicated by the intervals, not the terms of the statement.’ And this is how Beckett and many of his critics came to view his work, that it approached silence, sought to bring ‘the terms of the statement’ in fiction and drama to an end. Language had once been constructed and now it could be destroyed.

The lines from The Countess Cathleen that Beckett knew were the last words:

The years like great black oxen tread the world,
And God the herdman goads them on behind,
And I am broken by their passing feet.

As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it – be it something or nothing – begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today.