Beckett and Phenomenology (review)

Since his rise to prominence in the 1960s, Beckett has consistently been read as a peculiarly "philosophical" writer. This account has taken many forms, from early readings that placed him within the context of post-war French existentialism, to a later sense that his works capture, perhaps even enact, the dynamics of poststructuralist theory, to recent movements, spurred on by the release of the "Philosophy Notes" and "Psychology Notes" of the 1930s, to read Beckett's writing in light of his own philosophical influences and engagements. Throughout this history, phenomenology has remained an oblique presence, a spectre that emerged with the Sartre connection and which has haunted subsequent accounts while receiving surprisingly little attention in its own right. Beckett and Phenomenology, as the first sustained attempt to situate Beckett in relation to the phenomenological tradition, is therefore a welcome and important corrective to what has proven to be a significant critical blind spot.

In this light, Beckett and Phenomenology is a useful and important volume. The eleven essays by major Beckett scholars collected here showcase the breadth and diversity of available approaches to Beckett's relationship to phenomenology, and in doing so represent both a significant contribution to scholarship in their own right and a taste of the potential productivity of this approach for future work. This exploration develops across two parts. The first, which consists of four essays situating Beckett in relation to Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, lays the groundwork for an account of Beckett's relation to phenomenology by locating him with respect to its canon. The second part is more capacious, offering a series of accounts of Beckett's own intervention in areas of phenomenological debate, from immaturity and sleep to history, aesthetics and reading practices.

The essays of the first section draw out some key themes that pervade Beckett's relationship to phenomenology, establishing as well the basic methodological approaches available for such work. Matthew Feldman's opening chapter locates Beckett's interest in and engagement with Husserl within the context of Beckett's engagement with philosophy in general, convincingly arguing that phenomenology for Beckett "marked the conclusion of his search for philosophical answers" (22) by offering a provisional solution to his concern with the subject-object division and its implications for art. A strong piece of scholarship in its own right, this essay grounds those that follow within a crucial historical perspective and makes an important case for a material and intellectual connection between Beckett and phenomenology. Shane Weller's excellent account of the under-studied relation between Beckett and Heidegger provides an introduction to two interrelated claims that reappear throughout this volume: that Beckett's phenomenology can be understood as an attempt to provide a phenomenological account of nothingness; and that his writing pushes phenomenology to a kind of crisis, in this case through Weller's claim that "in L'Innomable . . . the possibility of both any phenomenology and any ontology of the nothing breaks down" (35). Steven Connor turns from nothingness to the agonies of existence, offering a highly original and thought-provoking reconsideration of the now rather unfashionable Beckett-Sartre relationship. Arguing that Beckett and Sartre's affinity is best understood through their shared—although not identical—accounts of nausea as the expression of our encounter with embodied contingency, Connor's chapter is a fascinating and very important re-evaluation of a central connection in twentieth-century thought. Drawing this overview of Beckett and the major phenomenologists to a close, Ulrika Maude underlines the value of phenomenology for an embodied account with a brilliant chapter that reads Beckett alongside Merleau-Ponty to provide an illuminating account of Beckett's phenomenology of perception.

Opening to other theorists and other thematics, the final seven chapters discuss Beckett's interventions in phenomenology and the usefulness of phenomenological perspectives for a reading of Beckett. Mark Nixon offers a strong account of the relationship between life-world and art-world in Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Jean-Michel Rabaté's unusual and provocative pairing of Murphy with Gombrowicz...