Law of the Excluded Middle and Beckett’s Realm of Neitherness

Abstract

This study traces the play of thresholds in Beckett’s short text “neither”. Since its publication in 1976, the text has been haunted by its thematic indeterminacy. Originally published as a poem, it was gathered with other pieces of short prose on Beckett’s suggestion when he insisted that it was a short story. The protagonist (though it is too strong a term to be used in the present context) finds themself before the mobile gates of the neitherworld “whose doors once neared gently close/once turned away from gently part again”. Beckett’s text creates a paradigmatic limbo, a non-space tussling with the ghosts of being. The movement is not, as Garin Dowd contends, “from its presence to its absence, from its being to non-being, from its formation to its emptying”; the beingness of being is already reduced to shadows. The reflex of opening and closure, the subject of the text, is further displaced on to the door, effectively quashing the potency of human agency. The door here is the reality of being. The effigy of a person is left stranded on the in-between spaces. This inbetweenness is located on the site of excluded middle—a site considered untenable in the classical logic. Moreover, the study looks at the ontological praxis of this inbetweenness.