Audience of Self / Audience of Reader

The notion of archives is ancient. As a designated place where records of value to a community or state are deposited, both for the purposes of preservation and legal surety, the intent of an archive is to secure property and continuity by making historical evidence available for public access in the future. The very idea of an archive carries complex assumptions about history, community, and value. The archives of Samuel Beckett are relatively young. It is less than sixty years since the "great extractor," Jake Schwartz began trading in Beckett manuscripts.¹ Only forty years ago, James Knowlson began to assemble the Samuel Beckett Archives, now formally established as the Beckett International Foundation at the University of Reading. Although rich in offerings, the collections of Beckett manuscripts at the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin, Indiana University, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Delaware, Ohio State University in Columbus, Syracuse University, Boston College, Harvard, The Library of Congress, Trinity College, Dublin, as well as IMEC in Caen, the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach, and the Akademie der Künste Archiv in Berlin are relatively new. Indeed these collections continue to grow as materials in private hands make their way, through gift or sale, to these archives and other depositories.

For Beckett scholars, the breadth of materials is the result of efforts to collect, to preserve, and to describe by, among others, James Knowlson, John Pilling, Mary Bryden, Breon Mitchell, Carlton Lake, Jane Maxwell, Matthijs Engelberts, and Everett Frost. Scholarship, augmented by electronic methodologies, has rapidly created detailed finding aids and made these materials accessible. That only two years intervened between the announcement of the accession of the James and Elizabeth Knowlson collection by the Beckett International Foundation, and its electronic catalogue of over 2500 groups of materials and interviews is, itself, a testament to their scholarship as well as the institutional collaboration that makes it possible for us to consult this immense and uniquely valuable material. In the short history of Beckett studies, publication of Samuel Beckett's production notebooks, the description of Beckett's manuscripts at Trinity College Dublin, Matthew Feldman's presentation of Beckett's reading, Mark Nixon's publication about Beckett's German diaries from 1936-1937, the generative manuscript comparisons begun by James Knowlson and S. E. Gontarski, continued by Charles Krance and Dirk van Hulle, have provided a plethora of starting points for archival research.²

Ruby Cohn's final study A Beckett Canon augments earlier indices of archival holdings such as Richard Admussen's The Samuel Beckett Manuscripts, and the manuscript catalogues of materials in institutional archives. We may be close to a definitive bibliography of Beckett's published work (begun by Raymond Federman and John Fletcher, carried forward by Robin J. Davis, Melvin J. Friedman, and Peter C. Hoy) with a web-based and updatable bibliography edited by Breon Mitchell, Director of the Lilly Library, Indiana University, anticipated in the coming year.³

As a result of these collective efforts, do we have a canon in the archives? It has been more than two decades since Beckett's death in 1989. While we can say that the archives are nearly finite, they are not finished. Not only are collections scattered, but items known to have existed have been destroyed, for example Leslie Daiken's class notes, acquired by Henry Wenning and sent to Beckett; and on the other hand, items said to be destroyed do still exist in part or by report, for example Lucia Joyce's letters.⁴ Archives hold unpublished manuscripts and fragments thereof; there are series of drafts, some of them neatly arranged by Beckett himself, that invite comparative study. And there are letters, spanning the years of friendship, long correspondences reflecting the ebb and flow of relationships, just as even brief exchanges of letters provide a record of interaction, or interest, or reflection.

Do these remains show Beckett wrestling with his texts? First to get it down, whether all in a sitting or, literally, "half a page on good days."⁶ Do the shards record the weighing of words, the shaping...