Abandoned Prose

Abandoned Prose

"there are several older women on my street who sit on their stoops or in deck chairs when the sun is shining. They lodge themselves there defiantly, not smiling. As if a biological imperative instead of a pleasure. They have always been here. They have been here as long as I have been here. Decade after decade. But when I sit on the stoop I pretend not to see them and they pretend not to see me. We maintain a rigorous pretence of privacy. We sit here simply because we like it, the air, the light. We do it for the pleasure it brings us. Sometimes I’ll open a can of Guinness. I suspect they don’t like it when I do this. It doesn’t matter. Sitting on the stoop with these women I feel like I’m part of an organism, one cell in a complex cellular structure: a neighbourhood. These summer days with the long stretch between nightspans

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I don’t know how long I have been here. It’s not a case of being out and coming to. Eventually I stand. I stagger out of the Drury Buildings. There is nothing to keep me. I’m on the street outside and it’s all lights and noise lapping, people out on the tiles, laughter and loud talk, but all of it soothing. I make my way down Castle Market, Coppinger Row. I have nothing but good wishes for the people I pass. We are all just making our way. I take the turn up Johnson’s Court. The Christmas lights are up. The lane is covered in a canopy of lights. I follow the trail of them. I feel like I am in a fairy story. I could forgive anybody anything now. I wish I had all my friends around me. I feel as if I do. I feel them walking with me up the laneway and we are surrounded by soft noise, music. I can speak to them. I am imbued with a kind of cosmic love and I shower it upon them all: the living, the dead"

Nathan O'Donnell

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This publication is an outcome of a Samuel Beckett Creative Fellowship at Trinity College Dublin in 2023, part of a series of fellowships organised between Trinity and the Samuel Beckett Research Centre, Reading University, that facilitate artists to respond to Beckett’s archives. Included in the Samuel Beckett Collection at Trinity College Dublin is a faded l’Aigle-brand notebook (catalogue reference: TCD MS 4662) with a small accompanying index card that categorises its contents according to the following four sections: ‘abandoned theatre / abandoned prose / Fragments of translation of Malone meurt / Epistolary scraps’. Having counted the number of lines per page, allowing an average word count per line, and factoring in the many scrawled deletions and blacked-out lines and sections, the section of ‘abandoned prose’ has been calculated to come to a total of 2503 words.This is also the total number of words reproduced in this book, written by Nathan O’Donnell and designed by Clare Bell. (Bell explored the idea of abandonment through the use of pebbles, absentmindedly collected and gathered by her family and friends on beach and cliff walks, only to be found later in pockets, jars and the corners of bookcases.) The text is composed of extracts and fragments of prose from old projects—essays, short stories, scripts, books—that had previously been, for whatever reason, shelved. For this publication, these prose extracts have simply been added to one another until the word count was reached.

Size: 135 x 210mm

The paper specified is Munken Bookwove at 80gsm

Type face: Dashiell, Signal Foundry

Printing: Print Media Services