Beckett, Technology and the Body (review)

Within the first few pages of Ulrika Maude's book, one is made aware of how little substance there has been to earlier critical versions of the body in Samuel Beckett's work. Beckett, Technology and the Body constitutes a persuasive and scholarly response to both the habitual masking of embodiment under the disguise of linguistic figure, and its overly brief treatment as uncomplicated impediment to the more important stuff of the mind. Instead, Maude makes an argument for the materialist body in Beckett's work, uncovering a pre-reflective phenomenology and illustrating the complex work done by the senses in the corpus.

The dangers of this trajectory are easily discerned. Without a self-narrating cipher through which to transform the body into an analysis of narrative or signification, a study of embodiment in Beckett's work may become a mere compendium of oddities. Happily, however, Maude's thesis is spun around Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body and references more recent studies of embodied experience including work by Michel Serres, Jonathan Rée, Elaine Scarry, and Steven Connor.

Maude's superlative scholarship also helps to give the book a convincing thrust against critical myths which dictate that Beckett's work "tends towards disembodiment, silence and stasis" (4). The magnitude of this erudition seems, however, rather betrayed by the house style, which places roughly one third of the text into often substantial notes. In many cases these do not only anchor claims in the appropriate context but add valuable detail to the argument and will prove extremely useful to scholars working in this area in the future.

The strength of Maude's claim that the basic mechanics of perception have been neglected in previous studies of Beckett is shown particularly well in the second chapter, "The Place of Vision." Discussing Cézanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings, she compares comments made in Beckett's letters to Thomas MacGreevy in the 1930s and Merleau-Ponty's essay "Cézanne's Doubt." Drawing on empirical and philosophical works in this way ensures that the substantial subject of looking is not itself overlooked as a means of locating a source or illustrating a metaphysical claim, but allows dissection of Beckett's objection to "the falsifying view of 'landscape', depicted as if it existed in relation to the viewing subject" (29).

Indeed, in her use of archival materials in coordination with philosophical frameworks, Maude offers a compelling method as well as a convincing argument for the treatment of Beckett's work. Recent augmentation of archival material in the field has prompted a growth in genetic studies and hints of a polarization in method. Maude's use of this material, such as her excellent work with the previously unstudied documents at the Südwestrundfunk archive, demonstrates the insight and evidence afforded by the archive to those not in pursuit of a stemma of drafts and revisions or a network of influences.

Crucially, although Maude discusses the development of Beckett's opinions in the 1930s into the Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit and is alive to their influence on Beckett's later writings, appropriate attention is given to the gallery-gazing that occupied him for so long. The discussion of looking, drawn from these comments, thus effects a satisfying development in Beckett criticism close to that which Beckett discerned in himself, writing to MacGreevy in November 1936 "I used never to be happy with a picture till it was literature, but now that need is gone."¹

Other chapters cover hearing, memory, skin and touch, and movement. The most satisfying chapter of all is left to the end of the book, where a fascinating although perhaps belated discussion of the titular technology covers Beckett's engagement with various "perceptual technologies" (113). Allowing her argument a longer leash than in earlier chapters Maude gives accounts of the development of the moving picture and the x-ray, and the depiction of the latter in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, both of which deepen the subsequent...