[Rosemary] Pountney sees the term ‘vaguen’ in the play’s second typescript as ‘explicit testimony to [Samuel] Beckett’s policy of “vaguening” the later drafts of his plays’ (1988: 149).

Mud causes most critics to invoke Beckett, and like that master Fornes [i.e., María Irene Fornés] "vaguens" the setting of her elemental characters.

To situate an image or a phrase on the boundaries of several interpretations—to "vaguen" the image—so the viewer/listener must work the consequences of the situation within neural maps of the cerebral cortex, is obviously a goal of any artist.

This increasing ambiguity fits in with Beckett's strategy to ‘vaguen’ his text, as Rosemary Pountney has demonstrated with reference to the theatre.

The spaces of Beckett’s drama and prose—particularly the later work—seem for the most part abstract, dislocated, and disconnected from material place. The strategies that Beckett employed in his writing, his vaguening of time and place for instance, have helped foster this popular way of seeing that work.

As both artists [Samuel Beckett and Joseph Mallord William Turner] developed, their imagery vaguened. The result is imagery hazened, a studied, a crafted indistinction. Beckett thus situates himself (and his art) in the midst of such a late-modernist or early postmodernist ethos, exploring the issues of perspective and so consciousness, of perception much celebrated but doomed to distortion and incompletion, for the remainder of his career.

In an example of the kind of wavering syntax that characterizes all the ill-said language to follow, vagueness penetrates the finest grain of Beckett's language here [in Ill Seen Ill Said (1982)]. […] "Say one furlong. On an average" blends the meanings of "say" as "let us suppose"—a tentative hypothesis—and "say" as "approximately"—a gesture of rough measurement that is promptly vaguened to "an average".

Vaguen

Meaning

Verb

Rhymes