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Reviewed by:
  • Beckett's Proust/Deleuze's Proust
  • David Ellison
Beckett's Proust/Deleuze's Proust. Edited by Mary Bryden and Margaret Topping. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. xvi + 248 pp. Hb £55.00; $90.00.

Collections of short essays, especially when they derive from academic conference papers, run the risk of intellectual dispersal: too many ideas not sufficiently developed, repetition without a modicum of redemptive difference. Based upon an international conference held at Cardiff University in Beckett's Centenary Year, 2006, the essays in Beckett's Proust/Deleuze's Proust only occasionally fall into this trap; only occasionally do they echo each other superficially and non-productively. For the most part, the reader of this multifaceted and well-constructed volume can only be impressed by the intelligence of the essays' writers, by their knowledge of the trio Proust-Beckett-Deleuze, and by the clarity with which they articulate their respective arguments. Usefully organized into three large sections — 'Reading Encounters', Visual, Cinematic and Sonic Encounters', and 'Bodily Encounters' — the collection as formatted by Bryden and Topping succeeds in mapping the quite diverse literary, filmic, musical, somatic, and psychosomatic levels at which the texts of Proust, Beckett, and Deleuze intersect, diverge, coalesce, and illuminate each other. The editors believe, justifiably, that the collected essays demonstrate a 'confluence of ideas' (p. 6) between and among the three writers; and it is no coincidence that one of them — Gilles Deleuze, occasionally accompanied by Félix Guattari — provides the theoretical armature (for example, the notions of 'transversals', the 'rhizome', and 'deterritorialization') with which to describe this 'confluence' with some sophistication. Thus the volume is by no means a contemporary rehash of an 'influence study', but rather an ensemble or assemblage that, in showing quite variously and quite precisely how Proust, Beckett, and Deleuze read each other, contributes in significant ways to a general theory of reading, if one understands that theory to mean the process of appropriation/misappropriation by which one writer invests but also divests himself, ingests but also eliminates from herself, the texts of that other writer to whom one is temporarily devoted or even enslaved. (In a wonderful pastiche, chosen, quite appropriately, as the Epilogue, Jérôme Cornette, an original young scholar whose premature death forms part of the texture of the collection, imagines letters written from Proust to both Deleuze and Beckett, illustrating playfully but also profoundly the uncanny textual relation whereby the earlier author appears to be the unlikely reader of his successors, linked to them in strange but beautiful ways — producing the kind of textual effect that Proust himself [End Page 118] called 'le côté Dostoïevski des Lettres de Madame de Sévigné'.) Although all of the essays brought together here command respect for their intellectual integrity, those that rise a bit above the others detail more than a 'confluence of ideas' in that they address quite concretely issues of style, of rhetoric, of linguistic immanence. Proust may doubtless have appealed to the young, philosophically inclined Beckett and to Deleuze the conceptual thinker for his 'ideas', but it is as craftsman, as artisan of language that he created a work that, precisely because it is appropriated by others, remains new.

David Ellison
University of Miami
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