Beckett On and On ... ed. by Lois Oppenheim and Marius Buning (review)

Book Reviews 721 ideas (96). And Warner. the least faithful to the text. discusses her controversial 1994 production of Footfalls. which the Beckett estate closed down. An interview with Edward Beckett, nephew and executor to the playwright, ends the section by giving the estate's point of view on the viewing issue of how to play Becke.lt after his death. Interestingly, in his review of the Mabou Mines' stage adaptations of Beckett's prose, Gussow points to a reasonas to why Beckett, and now the estate. was so sharply critical of departures from the te.xts of the plays. Gussow claims that the most successful adaptations permitted by Beckett are those that discover a strong visual image such as the narrator standing knee-deep in his grave in Frederick Neumann's perfonnance of Worsrward Ho. Such vivid visual imagery corresponds to the rocking chair in Rockaby and the corona of while hair in That Time (164). Is it the case that to Beckett changing the visual semiotics of the scene, as Nichols and Warner did, would have the same damaging effect as rewriting the words? Gussow's professionalism as a writer emerges over and over in this book. He always seems to ask just the right questions in his inlerviews, and the portrait of Beckett and his work that slowly develops is without sentimentality. The visit he makes to Beckett's home in Paris after the playwright's death is typical of the restraint Gussow places on himself. Rather than subjecting the reader to Beckettian symbols, Gussow simply describes the apartment, the books in the bookcases, and the view from the study window. ELIZABETH KLAVER, SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY AT CARBONDALE LOIS OPPENHEIM and MARIUS BUNlNG, ed. Beckett On and On ... Madison, Teaneck NJ: Fairleigh University Press; London; Mississauga, ON; Associated University Presses 1996. Pp. 260. $36.50. The nineteen essays in this collection derive from the Beckett International Conference at The Hague in 1992 (rather puzzlingly described here as only the second such, though several had preceded it). The editors have made their selection and arranged it along a conventional academic line, with literary theory and topics like "Gender" to the fore. They cater to a variety of approaches, however, by using catch-all headings like "Theatricality" which allow almost anything. There is something for most reade.rs in the volume though only those well versed in the coterie language of the theorists will follow Carla Locatelli when she explains that her use of a particular expression ("diachronic genesis") "obviously" grows from her personal uneasiness with "the current hermeneutical opposition that dichotomises (more or Jess overtly) 'structural ' and 'phenomenological' interpretive options." A specialtasle , indeed, is required here: it seems a pity, for Locatelli can write more openly and is well worth reading when she does. It's true, of course, that Becken enjoyed pedantry . John Pilling reminds us of that in a witty account of the figures of speech deployed by Arsene in Waft. He adds an extra layer of scholastic pleasure with an 722 Book Reviews "addenda" which places them in their classical categories, something the "accomplished rhetorician" omitted to do (though he would surely have known, when declaiming, for instance, "Personally of course I regret all. All, all, ali," that he was indulging in "anadipiosis, with epizeuxis"), Contributors weave some elaborate thought patterns of their own around Beckett's texts with a confidence such as Wanda Balzano shows in "remythologising" How It Is. She is refreshingly candid about the arbitrary element in the process: "Voice and writing (or, let me say, Echo and Narcissus)." Most of the writers aim to enter what Eliza- -beth Klaver calls Beckett's "postrnodem space," Indetenninacy reigns there, though as David J. Gordon points out, even Beckettians can only tolerate a certain amount of it when the question "what text?" arises. He gives a masterly account both of the general issue - the concept of "authority" in texts - and of the special problems posed by Beckett's bilingualism and his revisions. Indeterminacy of another kind dominates discussion of gender identity, a recurring theme. Leslie Hill ingeniously erodes the femininity of W in Rockaby to the point where the play becomes a piece of...