Chronicles of Disorder: Samuel Beckett and the Cultural Politics of the Modern Novel (review)

Chronicles of Disorder: Samuel Beckett and the Cultural Politics of the Modern Novel. David Weisberg. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Pp. vii + 194. $54.50 (cloth); $17.95 (paper).

For decades now, Samuel Beckett's work has invited extensive commentary and explication, above all perhaps to confront a basic question: Whatever might have possessed the man to write this way? Today, however, one senses that the peculiarly intense quality of this appreciative attention, which takes its departure from the singularity of Beckett's writing, may also have been a source of blindness among professional Beckett readers. Recent critics have exerted themselves to reconsider Beckett within the occasion of his writing, and the results have provoked controversy. For what may seem to some as gymnastically dialectical readings of Beckett's historical "typicality," to others appear perverse gyrations in the face of the evidence of his uniqueness. David Weisberg's Chronicles of Disorder is an excellent instance of the new contextualizing trend of Beckett criticism, and it is sure to provoke the kind of polarized reactions that I have described. Weisberg, indeed, explicitly acknowledges that "for those who feel that uncovering Beckett's typicality diminishes his achievement, this book will seem of little value" (9).

His construal of this typicality, however, is far from reductive. Beckett, in his view, internalized typical demands on the European intellectual/author at mid-century; the marked contradictions of that role provided a productive impulse to his literary achievements. Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and (in a qualified way) Theodor Adorno took up one-sided positions within the cultural political field, at which they arrived through blindness to or willed exclusion of opposed demands. Beckett's distinction was not, Weisberg persuasively argues, that he remained indifferent to the debates that raged among these pivotal figures. It is rather his acceptance of the cultural-political "mess" as irredeemable that was historically prescient. Rather than seeking to secure some region internal to it as the means for salvaging the broken whole, his writing maps the riven site of modern intellectual labor itself.

Weisberg utilizes this basic framework to construct an evaluative chronology of Beckett's work, with the post-war trilogy at its acme (and Molloy [1951] and The Unnameable [1953] above Malone Dies [1951]). To Beckett as author he ascribes an increasing self-awareness, a penetrating reflexivity about the antinomies of his social role as modernist writer/intellectual. It is, in turn, this shift in Beckett's cultural political self-awareness that motivates Weisberg's distinction between the fiction up to Watt (written in the late years of World War II) and the prose from the Nouvelles (the later 1940s and early 1950s) to the trilogy. Formulaically--and I should add that he offers a good deal of close reading to flesh out his formulae--Beckett's "early works are contradictory, his later works are intentionally 'about' contradictions" (10).

Contrary to the tendency to tap Beckett's critical writings as sources of handy quotations (cited repeatedly by critic after critic), he analyzes these texts carefully and comprehensively to specify the polemical valence of Beckett's arguments, relating them to Beckett's early fiction. He also unlocks the social content of the Nouvelles, treating them not merely as rehearsals for the serious work of the postwar trilogy, but as themselves significant achievements in the evolution of Beckett's writing. Finally, his readings of the two sections of Molloy and his surprising comparison of The Unnameable and George Orwell's 1984 are notable additions to the criticism of the trilogy.

A critical construction as "strong" as Weisberg's is, however, also a constraining structure. It is worth highlighting two criticisms that follow from it, not so much to point out "shortcomings" of this fine book, but rather to delineate some further issues for debate and critical elaboration. First is that, despite its nuanced shift towards...