SOURCE: "Modernism and What Happened to It," in Essays in Criticism, Vol. 37, No. 2, April, 1987, pp. 97-109.

In the following essay, which was originally delivered as a lecture in 1987, Kenner considers the linguistic complexity of Modernist works.

To commence with good news: the Last Modernist is well in Paris where he lives under the name of Beckett. He has a typewriter and an unlisted phone, but is so much the man of some ancien régime that he grants no interviews and never did. He writes by preference in a language he can remember learning at Portora Royal School in the north of Ireland, and one of his plays contains (in English paraphrase) the following exchange:

—Have your seeds sprouted yet?

—No, they have not sprouted. If they were going to sprout they would have sprouted by now. Now they will never sprout.

In the French in which he...