Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Centennial Beckett

 Copyright © 2007 The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved.

Modernism/modernity 15.1 (2007) 179-187

Centennial Beckett:

The Gray Canon and the Fusion of Horizons

Reviewed by

Ulrika Maude

University of Durham


Beckett after Beckett. S. E. Gontarski and Anthony Uhlmann, eds. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006. Pp. ix + 227. $59.95 (cloth).


"Notes diverse holo": Catalogues of Beckett's Reading Notes and Other Manuscripts at Trinity College Dublin, with Supporting Essays. Matthijs Engelberts and Everett Frost, with Jane Maxwell. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006. Pp. 391. $104.00 (cloth).


Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body: The Organs and Senses in Modernism. Yoshiki Tajiri. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Pp. ix + 200. $65.00 (cloth).

Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image. Anthony Uhlmann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. viii + 191. $85.00 (cloth).


Zone of Evaporation: Samuel Beckett's Disjunctions. Paul Stewart. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006. Pp. 211. $55.00 (paper).


Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency. Andrew Gibson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. xiii + 322. $95.00 (cloth).



2006, the centenary of Beckett's birth, saw at least two dozen Beckett conferences, symposia, and colloquia organized in various parts of the globe, including Tallahassee, Reading, Dublin, Buenos Aires, London, [End Page 179] Paris, Prague, and Tokyo. What characterized these gatherings was the strength, vigor, and variety of new approaches to Beckett's work, also reflected in the sheer number of monographs and collections of essays on Beckett published in the centenary and its wake. If early approaches to Beckett's work might best be characterized as humanist-existentialist, and if the second wave of critical work on the author could broadly be described as poststructuralist, this third wave of Beckett criticism is more liberated from critical orthodoxies, and can broadly speaking be divided into two schools that also at times productively overlap: empirical criticism which relies heavily on biography and the vast number of manuscripts, notebooks, and letters Beckett wrote, and an imaginative "fusion of horizons," to quote Beckett's French critic, Bruno Clement, consisting of readings produced by critics and philosophers "who have known how to see in the oeuvres . . . that which was appropriate to them" (Clement in Beckett after Beckett, 131). Clement's examples, cited in his essay, "What the Philosophers Do with Samuel Beckett," are French and include three major thinkers, namely, Didier Anzieu, Gilles Deleuze, and Alain Badiou, all of whom offer oddly compelling and vastly different, if not incompatible, readings of Beckett's work. This characterization of the third wave of French Beckett criticism applies equally to critical approaches to Beckett's work in the English-speaking world and beyond.

The publication, in 1996, of James Knowlson's authorized biography, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, has had a considerable impact on Beckett criticism, in providing scholars with an informed understanding of Beckett's formative reading, interest in art, working habits, and preoccupations.1 The wealth of archival material, whether in the form of correspondence, notebooks, or manuscript drafts, referenced in Knowlson's biography, together with the archival material made available to critics in recent years, has itself triggered a rise in what could be labeled a new empiricism as well as the prominence of genetic criticism in Beckett studies.

Beckett after Beckett is a collection of fourteen essays and a letter Beckett wrote to Georges Duthuit in March 1949, preceding the famous Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, first published in transition in 1949, signed by Beckett and Duthuit.2 The publication of Beckett's letter to Duthuit, which sheds light on his thinking about aesthetics, is proof of the growing importance of what one of the coeditors of the volume, S. E. Gontarski, refers to as the "grey canon" (143). In his essay, "Greying the Canon: Beckett and Performance," Gontarski demonstrates Beckett's contradictory relation to his own work in his resistance to exegesis and his belittling of the role of author as authority, while simultaneously maintaining a puzzlingly strict control over even the smallest details of the various productions of his plays. In 1954, for instance, Beckett wrote to his American publisher, Barney Rosset, that he had "had a highly unsatisfactory interview with SIR Ralph Richardson who wanted the low-down on Pozzo, his home address and curriculum vitae," which clearly annoyed the author immensely (141). When Rick Cluchey asked Beckett, as late as 1980, if the little boy who appears in Hamm's "chronicle" in Endgame was Clov as a child, Beckett responded, "Don't know if the little boy is the young Clov, Rick . . . simply don't know" (142). Yet in a 1957 letter to Alan Schneider, Beckett's foremost American director, the author had stated that Hamm's chronicle was about "events leading up to Clov's arrival, alone presumably, the father having fallen by the way . . . . It also allows Clov's 'perception' of boy at end to be interpreted as vision of himself on last lap to 'shelter.'"3 As Gontarski demonstrates, through a discussion of Beckett's comments on various stage productions of Endgame, the author was often "uncautious" in what he did disclose about his plays, and a careful piecing together of theatrical notebooks, letters, and private conversations with actors and directors reveals that "Beckett's comments finally form something like traditional exposition, more Ibsen than he was wont to acknowledge" (143). The strict manner in which the author controlled the rights to his own plays, and the ever-growing persistence on the "primacy of the playwright in the process of performance," is exemplified in Beckett's growing involvement in productions, first as "advisor," then as "primary director," and finally, through the growing prominence of the gray canon, "as a spectre, a ghost of authority, into the après Beckett" (143). In an insightful discussion of a topic that has puzzled critics for decades, Gontarski compellingly argues that the

public posture of diminished authority often became a useful means of deflection for [Beckett], that is, itself a performance, inseparable from the mystique of the work . . . . as more of the peripheral, secondary, or what we might call the ghost or grey canon comes to [End Page 180] light and is made public (letters, notebooks, manuscripts and the like), it inevitably interacts with and reshapes, redefines, even from the margins (or especially from the margins), the white canon (or the traditional canon), and the more apparent it becomes that Beckett's voice was aporetic, as plural if not contradictory as that of his (other) characters.

(143)

A case in point of the re-evaluation of Beckett's work triggered by the gray canon is the significance of Fritz Mauthner (1849–1923), the Austro-Bohemian philosopher, whose major work, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, Beckett is known to have at least "skimmed through," as the author himself put it in a 1978 letter to Ruby Cohn.4 Beckett also made notes on his reading of Mauthner in his "Whoroscope Notebook," now held at the Beckett International Foundation at Reading, and there is an explicit reference to the philosopher in Rough for Radio II, written in the early 1960s and first published in French in 1975. In light of John Pilling's meticulously researched essay, "Beckett and Mauthner Revisited," which relies heavily on the gray canon, however, Mauthner's direct influence on Beckett may finally have been less significant than previously assumed, "a wild goose & a red herring," as Beckett himself put it in the 1978 letter to Ruby Cohn. Pilling, however, acknowledges that "the spectre of Mauthner has, for quite understandable reasons, . . . continued to loom large in the thoughts of Beckett's commentators" (165). Chris Ackerely's discussion of Max Nordau's Degeneration—which Beckett read in the early 1930s—as a source of medical terms, images, and curiosities, is another example of the growing prominence of the gray canon in Beckett studies.5 Beckett took eight pages of notes on Degeneration in his so-called "Dream Notebook," also held in the Beckett International Foundation collection.6 In "Samuel Beckett and Max Nordau," Ackerley casts light over four of Nordau's "images of degeneracy" that appear in Beckett's work, namely "sausage poisoning, the bloodied rafflesia, conaesthesis, and the Not-I" (169). Other highlights of Beckett after Beckett, less indebted perhaps to the gray canon as to an imaginative sensitivity to the primary texts, include Steven Connor's essay, "Beckett's Atmospheres," on Beckett and the air, and the wonderfully suggestive introduction to the volume, "Afterimages: Introducing Beckett's Ghosts," written by the two editors, Gontarski and Uhlmann.

In 1989, after Beckett's death, the executors of the Beckett Estate, Edward Beckett and Caroline Beckett Murphy, discovered, in Beckett's cellar, a collection of notebooks and manuscripts that Beckett had wrapped in brown paper and tucked into a trunk. These manuscripts were presented to Trinity College Dublin in 1997, and Notes diverse holo, which derives its title from the words Beckett had written on the brown wrapping paper in which the manuscripts were enclosed, is a catalog of this material, now available for consultation to scholars at Trinity College Dublin. In addition, Notes diverse holo contains nine essays on various Beckett manuscripts, written by prominent scholars in Beckett studies. The volume also contains a comprehensive catalog, compiled by Jane Maxwell, of the Samuel Beckett manuscripts held at Trinity College Dublin, previously unavailable outside the premises of the library. This alone would make the book an indispensable resource on the gray canon, one that complements the already-existing Beckett at Reading catalog, published in 1998, and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center catalog, available online.7

Notes diverse holo, however, offers far more than a mere list of archival documents. The book consists of a meticulous mapping and description of the twenty-one manuscripts acquired in 1997, which contain outlines, summaries, and transcriptions of Beckett's reading, whether in Latin, Italian, German, French, or English, during his sophister years at Trinity College Dublin, from 1925 to 1927, and the period from 1930 to 1936, during which Beckett read intensively—a time which was, as Beckett himself put it in a letter to Thomas MacGreevy, "soiled . . . with the old demon of notesnatching" (21). There do not appear to be any notes from Beckett's period at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris (1928–1930), during which he is likely to have read Bergson, Scopenhauer, Vico, Bruno, Descartes, and Kant. These notebooks, regrettably, have not been recovered. The ones that have, however, offer fascinating insight into Beckett's formative years. The material cataloged in Notes diverse holo comprises philosophy, psychology, various Italian subjects, and the history of English literature, as well as observations on Irish and European history. They also contain a reproduction of a rather moving map the young Beckett drew of "the geographical location of the philosophers" (76), in which names such as Xenophanes, Democritus, [End Page 181] Hippias, and Parmenides appear dotted over a map of southern Europe. They also contain Beckett's hand-drawn diagram of the subconscious, as well as one of Dante's Inferno (160, 40). Although the young Beckett made a well-known reference to the "loutishness of learning" in his early poem, "Gnome" (1934), he was certainly no stranger to its compulsions.

The most important documents cataloged and described in Notes diverse holo are Beckett's philosophy (MS 10967) and psychology notes (MS 10971/7 and MS 10971/8). The "Philosophy Notes" were begun, in typescript, after the summer of 1930, but the bulk of the work, handwritten, was probably completed in London, where Beckett spent six weeks of the summer of 1932, much of it in the British Library reading room. The notes consist largely of transcriptions of Wilhelm Windelband's History of Western Philosophy in two volumes, which date from 1893, and were revised for a second edition in 1901. Beckett used the Dublin University Calendar, which included "prescribed reading at Trinity College for the courses in the various disciplines," as a guide for much of the reading he undertook in this period; Windelband's book, at the time, formed part of the philosophy syllabus (21). Two other major sources for Beckett's "Philosophy Notes" were Archibald B. D. Alexander's A Short History of Philosophy and John Burnet's Greek Philosophy, Part I: Thales to Plato, both from 1908. It is striking that the bulk of the notes are on Greek philosophy, especially the presocratics, whose importance to Beckett's work Matthew Feldman has recently emphasized in his monograph on the interwar notes, Beckett's Books.8 The principal source of Beckett's "Psychology Notes," in turn, was Robert S. Woodworth's Contemporary Schools of Psychology, from 1931. Other substantial sources include Karin Stephen's Psychoanalysis and Medicine: The Wish to Fall Ill, from 1933, and Otto Rank's The Trauma of Birth, from 1929. Beckett also took notes on Freud's essay, "The Anatomy of the Mental Personality."9

The first set of "Psychology Notes" (MS 10971/7) contains descriptions of the major schools of psychology, with the headings "Psychoanalysis," "Behaviourism," "Purposivism," "Existentialism," and "Gestalt psychology" (159). The second set of notes (MS 10971/8) is dedicated to Ernest Jones, Wilhelm Stekel, Alfred Adler, and Otto Rank. As Everett Frost remarks in the preface to Notes diverse holo, Beckett's notes, somewhat surprisingly, "rarely contain an interpretive appraisal of what he was reading and are almost entirely without assessment or analysis of it" (20), although the notes do include the occasional delightful Beckettian pun or quip. The passage on Ernest Jones, for instance, begins with the heading "Erogenous Jones" (164); later in the manuscript, Jones is referred to as "Freudchen." Mostly, it transpires, Beckett copied large chunks of the books he consulted. This may partly have been due to the simple reason that Beckett could not have afforded, as a student and later as an aspiring writer, to purchase personal copies of all of the books he read. Furthermore, Beckett had fallen under the influence of Joyce in Paris, and as Frost remarks, "he had come to know intimately what was required to enter the tradition of learned writers with an encyclopaedic knowledge of their intellectual heritage" (23). Frost also mentions the probable influence of Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Beckett's close friend, the poet and critic, Thomas MacGreevy, who had been Beckett's predecessor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, was writing a book on Eliot for Chatto and Windus at the time Beckett was writing his book on Proust for the same publisher, which would have ensured Beckett's knowledge of Eliot's essay. As other critics have shown, amongst them Chris Ackerley in his introduction to Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy, Beckett's early style and method were influenced by Joyce, and Beckett's reading, much like Joyce's, found its way into the early fiction he wrote, Murphy (1938) being precisely a case in point.10Beckett's early method, in other words, was one of mild pilfering, which also explains Beckett's reference to "the old demon of notesnatching" (21).

The nine essays in Notes diverse holo include Mark Nixon's analysis of Beckett's reading of Goethe and German literature, in which Nixon draws on Beckett's "German Diaries" and his correspondence of the 1930s. Daniela Caselli, a specialist on the influence of Italian literature on Beckett's writing, advances the argument that, rather than existing on the margins of Beckett's work, manuscripts form "part of the poetics of marginality central to the Beckett canon" (237). Dirk van Hulle, a leading expert on genetic criticism, writes on Beckett's notes on Goethe's Faust, which he compares with Joyce's contemporary reading notes, while Anna MacMullan, who is an expert on Beckett and performance, contributes an essay on the manuscript of Beckett's "J. [End Page 182] M. Mime." John Pilling's essay on Beckett and English literature draws on Beckett's entries, in the "Whoroscope Notebook," from Elizabethan, Jacobean, and eighteenth-century English literature, which Beckett probably originally intended to incorporate into his novel, Murphy. Lois Overbeck and Martha Fehsenfeld draw on Beckett's soon-to-be-published correspondence and the light the letters cast over the publication history, translation, and production of Beckett's works, revealing Beckett's "evolving" rather than "iconic" texts. What all nine essays in Notes diverse holo have in common is the centrality the authors give to the gray canon. The essays provide valuable insight into material which can often be difficult to access.

Yoshiki Tajiri's book, Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body, although theoretical in its approach, represents the move towards more carefully contextualized and historicized readings of Beckett's oeuvre. Tajiri takes care to situate Beckett's work in the modernist context it rightfully belongs, drawing connections and points of convergence between Beckett and a host of other modernist and late-modernist writers and artists, such as Bataille, Bellmer, Duchamp, Eisenstein, Kafka, Marinetti, Moholy-Nagy, and Nabokov, as well as theorists such as Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, and Kittler. Tajiri also draws on Beckett's own reading, for instance of Degeneration and Otto Rank's The Trauma of Birth. Much early critical work on Beckett suffered precisely from a tendency to discuss the author's work out of context; one of the strengths of Tajiri's book is its careful contextualization of the argument it advances.

The book's main concern, as the title indicates, is the prosthetic body, which in Tajiri's reading, is "a body that has the inorganic other or the outside within it" or, more precisely, is itself "the locus for dynamic interactions between the body and material objects (including machines and technological devices), inside and outside, self and other, and for the concomitant problematisation and blurring of these distinctions" (6).

The book opens with a consideration of Beckett's first, posthumously published novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1992; written 1932), which Tajiri has translated into Japanese. The chapter focuses on autoeroticism, the "masturbation machine," which Tajiri links to notions of control, and the often-evaded question of Beckett's early misogyny, which here leads to a mechanization of male sexuality, also manifested in Beckett's early short story, "Assumption," dating from 1929. In Beckett's early writing, Tajiri argues, the defensive mechanization of the body, prominent as it is, is nonetheless forever threatening to break down, which distinguishes it from the work of such reactionary modernists as Wyndham Lewis and Marinetti, in whose work these defenses are more rigidly maintained. For Tajiri, a change occurs "from Watt onwards," where the obsession with the mechanized masturbating body declines and the "simple dichotomy of the threatening woman and the introvert misogynist recedes from the foreground" (34). One could take issue, however, with the dating of this shift in Beckett's work. First Love, written in 1946 after Watt, is after all one of Beckett's most misogynistic works, and Molloy (1951), written after the Four Novellas, fares no better.11 The shift away from misogynistic male characters and a hostile representation of female characters occurs later, around the time Beckett wrote his first radio play, All That Fall(1956), which features the female protagonist, Maddy Rooney. More compellingly, however, Tajiri concludes the chapter with a brief consideration of the permeable male body of The Unnamable (1953), which complicates gender boundaries by being governed by "uncontrollable flows" (38).

The second chapter of Tajiri's book is dedicated to the disorganized body of Beckett's trilogy. In Tajiri's reading, negative prostheses in the trilogy, "such as sticks or crutches . . . as well as 'positive' ones, such as the bicycle, tend to have an uncanny congeniality with the body," which ultimately obscures the boundaries between body and world, self and other (42). However, against the current grain of Beckett criticism, Tajiri's analysis is oddly Cartesian in its claim that "Beckett inherits from Descartes a completely detached, observing attitude towards the body, the deficient machine" (43). This seems at odds with the general spirit of Tajiri's book, and one wonders whether, were this indeed the case, Beckett's bodies would not always already form part of res extensa—Descartes's extended matter—which in turn would make the principal argument of the chapter redundant. Tajiri proceeds, nonetheless, with an interesting discussion of the confusion of the organs, most prominently bodily orifices, in The Unnamable and Not I (1972), where language becomes scatological, and tears, semen, and excrement are routinely conflated. "In the prosthetic body, whose boundaries are problematised," Tajiri argues, "the holes, the flows [End Page 183] and the surface are highlighted as particularly prosthetic parts because of the ambiguity of their being both inside and outside the body" (54).

The chapter dedicated to synaesthesia is compelling. Tajiri's starting point is that "[d]espite their differences," artists such as Bellmer or writers such as Bataille "shared with Beckett a conception of the body as fundamentally fragmented, disintegrated, formless and subject to arbitrary reorganisation" (79). This, in turn, entails the dislocation of the senses, which gives vent to a confusion of various forms of sensory perception.

Tajiri's chapter opens with a rigorous introduction to symbolist, modernist, and theoretical treatments of synaesthesia, which ranges from a consideration of Baudelaire and Rimbaud to Merleau-Ponty, McLuhan, and Kittler. Beckett's interest in synaesthesia begins early, and can be found in his critical monograph,Proust (1931), in which, Tajiri argues, Beckett's treatment of Proust's involuntary memory is essentially synaesthetic, in its transgression of "ordinary sensory division" (94). As we know, the young Beckett read Degeneration in the English translation of 1895. Beckett's notes on the book include a definition of the term "conaesthesis," which can be understood as the interplay between the various senses—a state broadly speaking similar to accounts of the semiotic or imaginary, though in Nordau with very different, negative connotations. The term finds its way into Dream of Fair to Middling Women and More Pricks than Kicks (1934) twice. It also appears in Molloy, and in Three Dialogues, the mock-Socratic tract on art, it emerges in the slightly altered form of "conaesthesia." Tajiri argues that the "images of disintegration, punctuation and surface piercing in [Beckett's] early work, which were equally connected to literature, music and painting, also suggest that his sensibility was conaesthetic or tactile before being specifically visual or aesthetic" (103). Somewhat surprisingly, then, unlike a number of his contemporaries, Beckett was not amenable to mixed-media collaboration, as Tajiri is careful to acknowledge. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Not I, as an example of a type of performative synaesthesia in Beckett's late work.

The remaining chapters are dedicated to the camera eye and the prosthetic voice. The former focuses on the manner in which technology permeates self-consciousness in Beckett's Film (1964), his first TV play, Eh Joe (1965), and a late prose text, Mal vu mal dit (1981), translated by Beckett in 1982 as Ill Seen Ill Said. In these works, the "prosthesis is incorporated into the inner world of self-consciousness," but this inner world is also exteriorized through the use of prosthetic devices (128). The final chapter opens with the curious claim that, in Beckett's work, "the physiological ear or 'the ear of flesh' does not appear to be important" (138). A number of critics would beg to differ, and there is ample evidence, for instance in Beckett's Theatrical Notebooks, of the importance of the "ear of flesh" in his works.12 One wonders, too, what Tajiri would make of Beckett's famous observation to Alan Schneider, in a letter of December 1957: "My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended)."13 Tajiri's focus, instead, is on the familiar relationship between the prosthetic voice and the voice of the skull, on which he however does find new and compelling things to say, in his reading of Beckett in light of différance, Derrida's ideas of telecommunication, and Kittler's "discourse network of 1900."

It would have been interesting, by way of conclusion, to read about the wider significance of Tajiri's findings to our understanding of Beckett's oeuvre. The book, however, is valuable and stimulating in addressing a host of largely neglected aspects of Beckett's writing. Tajiri's book is also a good example of the third wave of Beckett criticism that productively combines a form of empiricism with informed theoretical analysis.

Philosophical readings of Beckett's work continue to flourish, and Anthony Uhlmann's Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image opens up new and unexplored ground. What is interesting about Uhlmann's approach is that, while it is theoretical in its orientation, it too relies heavily on archival (empirical) material, such as Beckett's Latin notes on Arnold Geulincx—which were amongst the "Notes diverse holo," discovered after Beckett's death—and Beckett's letters to MacGreevy and Duthuit. Philosophical images, which Uhlmann takes great care to define, are as important to literature as they are to philosophy, and hence offer a point of convergence and interaction between the two, although they also function differently in the two disciplines. As Uhlmann puts it, "[i]mages can pass between literary and philosophical discourse, no doubt being transformed in the process of translation, but also carrying with them something in common, a translatable component which inheres in the image which is put into circulation" (3). [End Page 184]

Uhlmann's book begins with a discussion of philosophical images in light of Bergson's and Deleuze's theories. These are brought to bear on Beckett's own observations on aesthetics in works such as his well-known essay, "Peintres de l'Empêchement," written in 1948 on the art of the van Velde brothers, Bram and Geer. The third chapter traces Beckett's own aesthetic development from an early style which, in Uhlmann's reading, relies on relation and allusion, to a mature style which draws on non-relation. Chapter four, the highlight of the book, is dedicated to Geulincx's (1624–1669) recently-translated Ethics, and Beckett's detailed Latin notes of his own reading of the philosopher's work.14 Geulincx is already familiar to most Beckett critics because of his moral premise, "Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis," which Beckett himself cited as key to understanding Murphy. Uhlmann's reading, however, reveals a new dimension of Geulincx's impact on Beckett. One of the novelties of Uhlmann's analysis is his persuasive argument that "Beckett draws more heavily on the image of Geulincx's cogito than on the image of Descartes's cogito," which provides a useful corrective to much Beckett criticism (77).

In Geulincx's Ethics, the image of a mother or nurse rocking a cradle appears three times as a figure of limited individual freedom and God's will. This image, Uhlmann suggests, reappears in Beckett, in the image of the ubiquitous rocking chair. In an analysis of Murphy, Film, and Rockaby (1980), all of which feature the rocking chair as a central image, Uhlmann advances a striking reading of Beckett's work, one in which Geulincx's cradle, with its connotations of birth, is transformed into Beckett's rocking chair, associated with death. However, as Uhlmann skillfully demonstrates, the association with death was always already present in Geulincx's image, in his preoccupation with the question of suicide which "invades the image of the powerless child at birth" (84). This is one of the most compelling readings offered on Beckett and Geulincx and, for this reason alone, will render the book indispensable to Beckett critics. Other philosophical images from Geulincx that Uhlmann discusses include the ship, which Beckett's Molloy makes a well-known reference to: "I who had loved the image of old Geulincx, dead young, who left me free, on the black boat of Ulysses, to crawl toward the East, along the deck. That is a great measure of freedom, for him who has not the pioneering spirit."15 In a letter to the first German translator of Molloy, Dr E. Franzen, Beckett explains this image in the following manner:

This passage is suggested (a) by a passage in the Ethics of Geulincx where he compares human freedom to that of a man, on board a boat, carrying him irresistibly westward, free to move eastward within the limits of the boat itself, as far as the stern; and (b) by Ulysses' relation in Dante (Inf. 26) of his second voyage . . . . I imagine a member of the crew who does not share the adventurous spirit of Ulysses and is at least at liberty to crawl homewards . . . along the brief deck.

(78)

The strength of philosophical images, Uhlmann explains, lies in the fact that, while they are used to establish a connection, they simultaneously offer us instability and nonrelations. In their ability "to paper over cracks," philosophical images also betray "a problem which may be insoluble within a logical system," an aporia, therefore making "contradictory connections possible" (66). One example is precisely the above-mentioned image of the cradle in Geulincx's Ethics, a point of tension in the philosopher's argument, which for this precise reason is adopted by Beckett in the form of the rocking chair. For Uhlmann,

Beckett's use of occlusive images points us to a properly philosophical problem which is not solved, either in the Beckett text or the source from which it is drawn (though usually with the difference that, while the Beckett text acknowledges and draws attention to the problem of the problem, the source of the image might pretend that no problem exists).

(68)

The remainder of Uhlmann's book is dedicated to Bergson's notion of intuition which he applies to Beckett's adaptation of Berkeley's "Esse est percipi" in Film, and to the Stoics' thinking on [End Page 185] bodies and incorporeals, and the light this sheds on Beckett's late drama, in particular his last play, What Where (1983). Uhlmann discusses Beckett's television plays in relation to Deleuze's analysis of them in his famous final essay, "The Exhausted," but it would have been interesting to learn more about the philosophical images they might evoke, haunting as they are in their striking imagistic power.16 Trinity College Dublin, which houses Beckett's notes on Geulincx, also holds Beckett's notes on Gestalt theory, which form part of the "Psychology Notes" catalogued in Notes diverse holo. A discussion of the relevance of Beckett's early interest in Gestalt theory to his own image-creation would have made intriguing reading.

If a certain kind of aporia and non-relation is at the center of Uhlmann's thesis, then Zone of Evaporation has a closely-related focus, namely that of Beckett's disjunctions. Paul Stewart concentrates on Beckett's prose, from his first, posthumously published novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women to How It Is (1964), the English translation of Comment c'est (1961); these works, Stewart argues, are marked by various modes of disjunction. The prose works of the late 1970s and 1980s, in turn, are tonally different, often incorporating "[i]mages of communion" (13), a case in point being the late prose text, Company (1980). Stewart's argument progresses chronologically, culminating with a discussion of Beckett and Derrida, joined together by disjunction. Stewart, however, finds the phenomenological impact of Beckett's work more powerful than that of Derrida, due to its performative nature which involves the reader in "the zone of evaporation" (182). A fine example of Beckett's disjunctions is offered in Stewart's reading of Beckett's ubiquitous Three Dialogues, which he characterizes as "a series of dramatic arguments," in which D., the avatar of Duthuit, aims towards "reintegration," "continuity and relation," while B., Beckett himself, refuses to offer full arguments and insists, both formally and thematically, on non-relation, inconsistency, and disjunction (187, 189). The importance and novelty of Stewart's argument lies in the fact that, while Three Dialogues, as the author acknowledges, is critical commonplace in Beckett studies, its formal and perfomative nature has tended to be overlooked. Stewart demonstrates how much of the power of this play-like text, a "drama for two persons, in three acts," derives precisely from its formal qualities (187).

Andrew Gibson's Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency, offers an ambitious assessment of Alain Badiou's reading of Beckett, and the manner in which Beckett can be read in light of Badiou's philosophy. Gibson, in other words, not only discusses Badiou's own analysis of the author, but also at times critiques it, for instance in terms of its "pathophobia," an aversion to pathos or melancholy that Badiou inherits from the left. Gibson also points to fissures and omissions in Badiou's analysis, offering his own carefully considered suggestions. The book is an example of a "fusion of horizons," and parts company with the bulk of current Beckett criticism in its bold allegiance with a form of subtraction leading to abstraction.

Badiou's Beckett is a different creature from first and second generation critical conceptions of the author's work. Although Badiou's Beckett has some points of convergence with poststructuralist theory, his could more rightly be described as an ethical reading, in which Beckett emerges as a writer of ascesis and vigilance. Central to Badiou's Beckett is the possibility of the event, prominent in Beckett's mature writing from Texts for Nothing (1950–1952) onwards. Closely related to the event is the question of its seeing and naming, a misseeing and a missaying, "[f]or le bien dire, proper speech, always constitutes a return to well-established and familiar meanings" (127). The verbal expression of the event is therefore improper speech, le mal dit; the late Beckett is perhaps its major proponent and practitioner. In Mal vu mal dit, Badiou argues, the event emerges as a "surprise in language" (127).

Unlike most of the texts under review here, Gibson's project does not call for a study of Beckett's correspondence, manuscripts, or notebooks. The book, however, is impeccably researched. Badiou's mathematical Beckett, whose aesthetic method is paralleled with axioms from set theory, will not appeal to everyone, and Badiou's reading of the author has hitherto been less influential in the Anglo-Saxon (empirical) context than it has in le monde francophone. Gibson's book constitutes the first sustained study of the subject. In its depth of analysis, it will be difficult to surpass.

The third wave of Beckett criticism, which draws more freely on a combination of empirical research and theoretically informed analysis than its humanist and poststructuralist forebears, has generated new readings of Beckett's work which have not only revitalized Beckett studies, [End Page 186] but renewed the oeuvre itself. In the wake of the centenary, in the après Beckett, Beckett studies are thriving, as these fresh approaches attest.

Notes

1. James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996).

2. Republished as Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London: John Calder, 1965).

3. Maurice Harmon, ed., No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 22–23.

4. Fritz Mauthner, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, 3 Volumes (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1923).

5. Max Nordau, Degeneration (London: Heinemann, 1913).

6. An annotated edition of the notebook has been published as Samuel Beckett, Beckett's Dream Notebook, ed. John Pilling (Reading: Beckett International Foundation, 1999).

7. Mary Bryden, Julian Garforth and Peter Mills, Beckett at Reading: Catalogue of the Beckett Manuscript Collection at The University of Reading (Reading: Whiteknights Press and the Beckett International Foundation, 1998).

8. Matthew Feldman, Beckett's Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett's 'Interwar Notes' (New York and London: Continuum, 2006).

9. Sigmund Freud, "The Anatomy of the Mental Personality," in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, transl. W. J. H. Sprott (London: Hogarth Press, 1933), 78–106.

10. Chris Ackerley, Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy (Tallahassee: Journal of Beckett Studies Books, 2nd ed., 2004).

11. First Love, a novella, was written in French in 1946 as Premier amour, but not published until 1970; the English translation, by Beckett himself, had to await publication until 1973. The narrator of the novella, for instance, considers kicking his first love "in the cunt" and observes, in a casual manner, that "women smell a rigid phallus ten miles away." Samuel Beckett, The Complete Short Prose: 1929–1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove Press, 1995), 31.

12. See, for instance, James Knowlson, ed., The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett III: Krapp's Last Tape (London: Faber, 1992).

13. Harmon, No Author Better Served, 24.

14. Han van Ruler and Anthony Uhlmann, eds., Arnold Geulincx's Ethics with Samuel Beckett's Notes, transl. Martin Wilson (Leiden: Brill, 2006).

15. Samuel Beckett, Molloy (New York: Grove Press, 1955), 68.

16. Gilles Deleuze, "The Exhausted," in Essays Critical and Clinical, transl. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 152–74


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