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Reviewed by:
  • Samuel Beckett: History, Memory, Archive
  • Andrew Gibson
Samuel Beckett: History, Memory, Archive. Seán Kennedy and Katherine Weiss, eds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Pp. x + 226. $85.00 (cloth).

In recent years, Beckett studies have moved into a new phase. A young generation of scholars have abandoned the theoretical turn that dominated work on Beckett from the late 1980s onwards, and taken it in a historicist and positivist direction. This move has been important and invigorating. It has been fuelled by the emergence of the major Beckett biographies, chiefly Knowlson's, and the recognition that the archive contains a mass of unpublished material still requiring scholarly treatment, publication, and assessment. It also owes a good deal to slightly earlier historicizations of modernists once considered beyond the purview of the historicisms, especially Joyce. Kennedy and Weiss's volume is a major contribution to the new scholarship and, if the same cannot be said of every essay in it, then that is finally instructive, too.

The best work here is undoubtedly materialist in principle, that is, it works outward from what it takes in the first instance to be material givens, be they historical or archival. Most of the relevant contributors do what they have already proved themselves to be very good at doing. Among the archival scholars, Mark Nixon continues not only to thicken his account of Beckett in Germany in the years 1936-37 but, increasingly, to meditate on the emergent Beckettian historical and political thought it appears to suggest. Dirk Van Hulle reflects with customary panache on the implications of certain aspects of genetic methodology (the concepts of "foreshadowing," "backshadowing," and "sideshadowing") as indicating that we might start to treat Beckett"s whole oeuvre "as one long textual genesis," but also one in which "any document can momentarily become the center" (179). Among the historicists, Kennedy writes compellingly of the Beckett of Texts for Nothing (and after) as haunted by an uncompleted mourning for an Ireland still present as spectral landscapes. Most of all, in the outstanding essay in the book, James MacNaughton draws on both the Watt archive and serious historical research to argue that Watt contains an ironical, displaced critique of various forms of historical false consciousness. This essay is practically a model for various kinds of future work.

By contrast, the less plausible essays partly belong to an earlier phase of modernist studies insofar as it gave priority to the theoretical lens and interpreted on its basis. In the past, this produced some brilliant work on Beckett. Here, however, it causes problems, because the theory invoked is supposed to address history and the archive, but—since memory, it would seem, is always only a trace—actually turns them into "history" and the "archive," that is, loosened approximations. But this is certainly not the methodological principle chosen by Kennedy and MacNaughton. The result is a latent contradiction within the volume, since the "theoreticists" effectively write off precisely the seriously historicist and materialist presumption on which the rest of the essays proceed. [End Page 926]

This has various knock-on effects, two of which are particularly problematic. First, a substitute ("theoreticist") history surreptitiously appears alongside a complex material one. In a fine essay, Jackie Blackman provides an exact account of Beckett's important connections with the Holocaust and sensitive assessments both of his awareness of it and its effects on his work, whilst clearly and scrupulously distinguishing between "Jewish issues" and "wartime suffering" per se (72). But some of the "theoreticist" work is less painstaking, turning Auschwitz into the principal if not sole signifier of modern horror. Important though this move may be in Holocaust studies, in Beckett studies, it is woefully inadequate. Beckett espoused particular political causes, but he was a universalist not a contemporary particularist, and his historical world is one of generalized agony or convulsion, "[s]hadows falling over a large portion of the inhabited globe," as he puts it, bleakly (40). Secondly, Beckett becomes available to "trauma theory." Whatever the practical merits of this discipline, no doubt many and various, once translated into an aesthetics or a historical thought, it sounds singularly unBeckettian. Beckett's fastidious spirit would have shrivelled at...

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