Grey Time: Anachromism and Waiting for Beckett

Alongside marking Beckett’s obvious fascination with what we would now call greyscale images, this chapter will argue that Beckett’s modernist, often minimalist works also materialise an analogous temporal aesthetic: a grey time structured, in particular, by an attention to waiting without the possibility of fulfilment or progression. In a greyscale image, the value of each pixel is a single sample representing only an amount of light; in other words, it carries information only about intensity rather than chromatic difference. I want to argue that grey time might similarly be described as a temporality structured not by a movement through states that are clearly different in kind, but through the modulation of experiences of intensity that emerge while waiting. As contrasting differences that would enable forms of dialectical temporal progression become difficult to detect, Beckett’s commitment to what I will term brings into focus the time of post-World War II European and US modernity – a time in which a sense of a future into which one could step had sheared away. I will also argue that the concept of enables an exploration of how Beckett’s grey time also seems to reach forwards, proleptically, in ways that illuminate the contours of the contemporary moment – our own waiting times.