Something out of nothing

‘Nothing is funnier than unhappiness’. The line, spoken a third of the way through Fin de partie, offers a reasonable encapsulation of Samuel Beckett’s œuvre, a world in which the miseries of its characters offer a reliable fount of blackest amusement. Yet a different reading of the sentence reveals an even greater truth: the only thing funnier than unhappiness in Beckett is nothingness itself. There is an enormous trove of humor in the uninflected emptiness that pervades Beckett’s novels, plays, poems, and even his lone foray into film (the appropriately titled Film, starring Buster Keaton), and there are few other authors of the twentieth century who devoted so much effort to discovering just how much of nothing could be placed into works of narrative art.

György Kurtág’s compositions may be less fixated on absolute nullity, but his…