Once I saw the title, Think, Pig! I had to have Jean-Michel Rabaté’s book, published last year by Fordham University Press. It is subtitled Beckett at the Limit of the Human and its first chapter is called “How to Think Like a Pig”.

The first thing to be said about the book is the rather surprising fact that Rabaté does not give an in-depth examination of Lucky’s speech per se at all, though this description of How It Is might apply:

One soon guesses that this slime is partly made up of anal refuse issuing from the narrator’s mouth or anus. It is his “quaqua”, the remainder of a sickening and damaged discourse hesitating between logorrhea and diarrhea…. which connects Lucky’s “quaquaquaqua” with the word for derisive verbiage in German, “Quatsch quatsch quatsch.”

Rabaté surveys a variety of ways in which Beckett’s writing compares to the ideas of certain…