Abstract
Shelley is famous for his “speed”—conceptual precision, figurative economy, and poetics of momentum—and this speed is nowhere more evident or powerful than in his last poem, The Triumph of Life. In that poem, speed is also a thematic issue: the rapidity with which the Chariot of Life hurtles forward on its destructive course figures the overwhelming momentum of time, which leaves human agency in the dust. Beckett’s rhythms and his treatment of time would seem on the face of it to be inverse. Characters such as Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot seem to have all too much time on their hands. Many characters in Beckett, from Belacqua through the Unnameable, Winnie, and beyond, seem to occupy a purgatorial temporality in which nothing more can take place. These characters find themselves out of synch with time. And yet they are no more immune to time than Shelley’s ‘great stream / Of people… hurrying to & fro’. It’s because of the nature of time that they are confronted with this cognitive bafflement: they don’t know what is happening to them, any more than Winnie or the tramps do. The Augustinian problematic by which the past and future ‘had been, and would be not’ offers a counter-romantic view of time, not as a theater of absolute loss compensated for by sublime gain (as in Mont Blanc) but as a final loss of one’s footing, as the difference between speed and vacancy (Shelley and Beckett) becomes undone.