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20S Book Reviews up to Nature can now also hold a mirror up to the mirror of art" (So). Although the final chime sounds esthetic, Muecke's Irony breaks out of Critical Idiom into philosophic vision, and yet it is a valuable tool for the mere workaday critic. This particular critic, yours truly, is left holding a very mixed bag. Hinchliffe 's Absurd, Pollard's Satire, and Merchant's Comedy are more or less self-indulgent and unrigorous essays. Definitions and patterns emerge helpfully from lump's Burlesque, Thomson's Grotesque, and Muecke's Irony, none of them entirely devoted to drama. Farce and Comedy ofManners are wholly and knowledgeably concerned with drama; the most recent monographs in the series, they display a heartening awareness of plays in performance. None of the monographs distinguishes sufficiently between a genre and a technique of the same name. So Critical Idiom still needs pruning, grafting, and deeper roots in living drama. RUBY COHN, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA (DAVIS) LAWRENCE GRAVER AND RAYMOND FEDERMAN, EDS. Samuel Beckell: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1979. The most recent addition to the Routledge and Kegan Paul Critical Heritage Series is a volume on Samuel Beckett, edited by Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman, containing eighty-three items - twenty-nine devoted to the plays - culled from French, English, and American newspapers and periodicals, spanning forty-four years, and including comment on all Beckett's published works. An impressive undertaking, but one which falls far short of the stated goals ofthe General Editor'S Preface: "[to] learn a great deal about the state of criticism at large and ... gain an insight upon the tastes and literary thought of individual readers of the period. " Too much is covered and covered too generally. Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Poems in English, Play, Film, Imagination Dead Imagine, Ghost Trio, and but the clouds receive onc com~ ment each, while All that Fall and Krapp's Last Tape are each accorded two items - one of the latter being a Kenneth Tynan parody of Krapp, hardly an addition to the critical heritage. The actual problem lies less in the scope of the study than in the selection process itself. Beckett criticism has been fortunate to have attracted some of the best critical minds of the period - Hugh Kenner, Ruby Cohn, Martin Esslin, Ludovic Janvier; and yet only one, Kenner, is represented. The editors recognize the omissions, Graver admitting privately that finances dictated the choices. They even list the leading critical studies not once but twice in the book, and say in parentheses at one point, "The history of this part of Beckett's reputation will be written elsewhere" (p. 2S). However, the absence of those writers who have consistently written on Beckett is not a parenthetical matter, for what are presented instead are mostly reviews which generally fall into two Book Reviews 209 categories. First, there are those that dwell on the inherent problems of literary reviews: no time and no space. "It is impossible here to do more than sketch the main lines of Mr. Beckett's book," says the anonymous first reviewer of Proust (p. 39). Robert Brustein may say in a review that Play is a new departure for Beckett (p. 273), but in the half page given to his review, he can say little else. "Stale pretentiousness" is Donald Davis's assessment of Beckett's Poems in English in a review of sixteen lines, four ofthem quoted from Beckett (p. 272). The second group of reviewers are those who, to their seeming misfortune, do have room but are perplexed about how to fill it. "What does it all mean?" Anthony Hartley asks of Watt (p. 127); "If we could understand this essay we may praise it," concludes F.S. Flint about Proust (p. 41). The collection does provide some useful material. After seeing the Israel Shenker interview with Beckett quoted ad nauseam, it is revealing to learn that it is not actually an interview at all. Shenker says, "If he [Beckett] would relax his rule on interviews, this is what he would say (he has said it all, in precisely this phrasing)" (p. (47). No direct sources are cited. There...

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