Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett

Notes

Notes Notes from the Underground 1. Following our appearance there, the inmates formed their own Drama Workshop and, after a year or so of preparation on other plays, performed both Godot and Endgame themselves. They also put out a Commemorative Edition of the prison newspaper (November 28, 1957) that originally contained reviews, commentary, and letters about our presentation of Godot. 2. In 1959 I went abroad on a subsidy from the Ford Foundation, in the first round of grants given by Ford in the arts, as a sort of preface to the awards made a year or two later to the developing regional theaters, including The Actor's Workshop. The Bloody Show and the Eye of Prey I. Samuel Beckett, Not I, in Ends and Odds (New York: Grove, 1976) 14. Further references to Not I and other pieces from this collection will appear in the text under their own titles with page numbers from Ends and Odds. 2. The Unnamable (New York: Grove, 1958) 170. 3. The Lost Ones (New York: Grove, 1972) 15-16. 4. Molloy, trans. Patrick Bowles, with Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove, 1955) 7· 5. Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove, 1954) 7. 6. John Ashbery, Three Poems (New York: Penguin, 1977) 46. 7. Theodore W. Adorno, "Trying to Understand Endgame," New German Critique, no. 26 (1982): 121. 8. A Piece of Monologue, in Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 1984) 265. 9. Proust (New York: Grove, n.d.) 54. 10. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) 5. II. "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences," in Writing and Difference , trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978) 292. 12. Endgame (New York: Grove, 1958) 44. 13. From an Abandoned Work, in First Love and Other Shorts (New York: I97 I98 / Notes to Pages 89-II5 Grove, 1974) 39. Further references to this work and any other from the collection will appear in the text under their own titles with page numbers from First Love. 14. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text!, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975) 66-67. 15. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserts Theory of Signs!, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973) 15. 16. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema !' trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzett (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977) 50. 17. Quoted by Ruby Cohn, Back to Beckett (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973) 125-26. (Eleutheria was not yet published when this essay was written.) 18. Foirades/Fizzles (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1977), a catalogue of etchings by Jasper Johns on Beckett's text, unpaginated. Barthes and Beckett 1. Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments!' trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978) 12. 2. Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove, 1958) 18. 3. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes!, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977) 51-52. 4. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981) 75. 5. Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove, 1954) 58. 6. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams!, trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon, 1965) 617. 7. From an Abandoned Work!, in First Love and Other Shorts (New York: Grove, 1974) 47-48. Subsequent references to other shorts, appearing in the text, will be from this volume. 8. Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double!, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove, 1958) 52. 9. Beyond the Pleasure Principle!' trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton , 1961 ) 33. 10. The Unnamable (New York: Grove, 1958) 31. II. Proust (New York: Grove, n.d.) 29. The Oversight of Ceaseless Eyes 1. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove, 1954) 59. 2. That Time!, in The Collected Shorter Plays (New York: Grove, 1984) 230-31. 3. Proust (New York: Grove, n.d.) 6-7. 4. If the repetitions of the paranoia are consummately focused in the Notes to Pages 115-22 / 199 drama of Beckett, there was until his recent death the double irony of his own protective vigilance over the integrity of his texts and the correct way to stage them. Since his drama has, in a sense, prepared the ground for revisionist performance , his rage over the presumptions of other productions-sometimes shared by reverent scholars...