Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph by H. Porter Abbott (review)

Book Reviews H. PORTER ABBOTI. Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. pp. xiv, 196. $32.50. There is no presence more present than an absent presence, as shown by Beckett 's Godot, or his earlier Knotts and Endons. Samuel Beckett has been just such a presence within his own work. For years, "well-schooled" Beckett critics (as Porter Abbott refers to them) eschewed, ostensibly at Beckett's personal behest, the quest for the author behind the text or the speaker at the origin or end of the words. Beckett's own extratextual imprimatur, which paradoxically should not matter, seemed to encourage readings that spurn the dehors du texte. Abbott's study of Beckett, appearing earlier in the same year as James Knowlson's long-awaited "authorized biography," may indicate that Beckett studies will now open themselves further than ever before to longproscribed discussions of the author himself. However, the possession of more complete data (as in Knowlson's biography) or the use of a new term and a new approach (Abbott's "autography" as opposed to autobiography) cannot liberate such discussions from the many sticky paradoxes entailed in speaking of selves. Awareness of paradox does not exempt you from its force, though we write as if it did. One source of integrity in Beckett's fiction is the way it evokes, interweaves, and exploits such paradoxes as its basic material, to the point almost of declaring it impossible to speak. Although in speaking of the "Beckett" (the author) that is in Beckett (the oeuvre) - we will never escape these paradoxes - Abbott offers a fascinating way of reading the excluded Beckett back into his work. Abbott aims to illuminate both Beckett's work and the theory of autography or self-writing. Autography is not historically focussed, like autobiography. The author is not the distanced biographer of self, standing outside a life being narrated. Instead the author's work consists of "autographical action." The Modem Drama, 40 (1997) 163 Book Reviews author inhabits the work, "constantly working in the dark" like an insect within a cocoon or like "a mole in a molehill," as Beckett described himself (x-xi). Abbott says that if we read Edmund Gosse's Father and Sons from this perspective, we "read it with an eye not to a history of events now past but to an author doing something in the present at every point in his text" (4). Brief examples from Augustine and Wordsworth's Prelude also demonstrate the different results of this type of attention. It sounds a bit like autographical reading looks for "the author authoring," so that self and text are equally works in progress within a continuous present. .Abbott argues that Beckett turned upon his own body of work the Modernist oppositional drive to supersede old forms and cast dff old identities. This required that he be "ever alert to [language's] deadening or imprisoning effects, an object that required, in its tum, keeping that language from coming to an end. The function of writing was to avoid having written" (40). This formulation accords nicely with the anguished simultaneity of obligation and impossibility in Beckett's narratives. In order not to lapse into autobiography, or be captured by an undesired identity, Beckett's speakers must maintain this autographical stance through the writing of self as the only way to unwrite the self already written. Abbott's approach unites some of the disparate "Becketts" apparent within Beckett's work. There is Beckett the dramatist and Beckett the novelist, just as there is Beckett the painstaking craftsman or directorial "control freak," and the Beckett who mocked overan~lysis of his plays. Abbott reconciles novelist and dramatist in a delightfully unanticipated and ingenious comparison with Dickens. Dickens's texts, so often performed publicly by the author, become "scripts for the dramatic rendering of the author himself' (119). Direct connections between the text-as-script and the real author may have been desired by Dickens and fled by Beckett, but in each case we see "the script condition of prose narrative." This in tum allows the'perception that even in "the space of one's own prose text theatricality...