Samuel Beckett 2: parole, regard et corps par Llewellyn Brown (review)

The first volume in this Samuel Beckett series investigated the origins of creative desire in the author’s work. Its successor traces his writerly aesthetic through a triangular perspective linked to sound, image, and body, never forgetting (since this is Beckett) that these three elements embrace their own absences: silence, invisibility, and immateriality. In the strong first section, Karine Germoni undertakes a thorough genetic study of how Beckett developed the musical qualities of Comédie/Play across successive draft compositions resembling musical scores. Chris Ackerley pursues convincingly his argument that, in reaching out into the media of radio and television, Beckett was not so much seeking new forms to contain the chaos, but imaginatively recycling previous preoccupations into the new media. In the second section, Llewellyn Brown’s own essay seizes on the term besoin, which he interprets in the context of the need to see, constantly present in Beckett and yet only ever partially fulfilled. A similar mismatch between space and organism, or between skull and cosmos, is discussed in Guillaume Gesvret’s essay. Yet, as Yann Mével reminds us, Beckett’s world is not reducible to a grim truce between the surveying organism and its stubbornly occluded environs. Beckett’s theatre may dramatize a visual ascesis in which human traces are always diminishing, but the searching gaze remains robust, even ravening. As Myriam Jeantroux concludes in the third section, ‘cette exigence viscérale de l’écriture est un élan vital qui répond à la mort par la création’ (p. 158). In the final essay, Marie Jejcic argues that, if Proust allows space to defer to time, Beckett does the opposite, by taking the body as the starting point for the search for subjectivity. (Ackerley, though, problematizes this differentiation by his wonderful comparison of Krapp’s tapes with Proust’s ‘“vases” qui captent les images d’hier, et qui, débouchés, peuvent inonder l’air avec le parfum du passé, d’un Paradis perdu’ (p. 62).) In so far as both the sonic and the visual loiter around a material postulate in Beckett, the final focus on body and space provides a meeting ground for the diverse elements of this volume. A high point is the essay by Sjef Houppermans, who explores communalities between the artistic practices of Beckett and of the two artists Bram and Geer van Velde, positing that Beckett’s lifelong pursuit of ‘des formes nécessaires, où le contenu se concrétise’ (p. 79) is one he shared in peculiarly intense fashion with the van Velde brothers. Houppermans also provides an important historicization of the relationship, suggesting that, when Beckett commented that the work of Bram and Geer traced its difficult path ‘au milieu de tant de couchés, d’assis et de transportés en commun’ (p. 84), he was attempting some kind of answer to the question of whether art remained possible after Auschwitz. This provides a further co-resonance with Julia Siboni’s excellent opening article, which builds on some of Georges Molinié’s theorizations in order to affiliate Beckett’s ‘silences de l’empêchement’ (p. 14) with a specifically post-Holocaust challenge to the feasibility of literary expression. These nine essays are topped with a useful Avant-propos and tailed with eleven substantial reviews of recent Beckett studies. Austere in appearance, this volume is rich in its coverage and highly to be recommended.