“Into What Nightmare Thingness Am I Fallen?”

In his four post-war novellas, Beckett explores the paradox of seeing without recognising. This article suggests that the failures of visual recognition in Beckett’s novellas can be illuminated with the neuropsychological concept of visual agnosia, a disorder of visual object recognition. Drawing on a range of philosophies of perception and clinical descriptions of visual agnosia, I propose that Beckett’s work gives phenomenological shape to the profoundly relational experience of visual agnosia. I conclude by considering the implications of what I am calling an agnosic relationality as it applies to Beckett’s work.