Samuel Beckett 3: les ‘dramaticules’ by Llewellyn Brown (review)

Understanding the late work of Samuel Beckett is all about understanding the disturbance of medium and genre that it enacts. The most recent of Lettres modernes Minard’s Samuel Beckett series takes as its subject the late, short pieces for theatre published in French as ‘dramaticules’, appropriately sustaining a concern for the plays’ transactions between textuality and performativity, different media, and different languages throughout. The collection is divided into sections on genre, presence and absence, and voice, with two separate features: a sound but largely familiar study of Beckett’s debts to Dante (Jean-Pierre Ferrini), and an engaging ‘témoignage’ on the experience of translating Beckett’s Christianity-saturated work into the culturally proximate but vitally distinct language and culture of Hebrew (Shimon Levy). Matthieu Protin, opening the collection, takes the instructive perspective that these pieces are theatrical experiments — as much prescriptions for a director as literary gestures for a reader — observing that the ‘scène’ nonetheless becomes less concrete in the course of Beckett’s practice. In fact, as this revealing reading observes, the plays develop out of the distinctive theatricality and deictic effects of Beckett’s prose works. Taking up some of these considerations, Stéphanie Ravez gives a very persuasive and articulate account of Solo (A Piece of Monologue), embracing an insightful meditation on the different visual media with which Beckett experimented late in his writing for theatre. Céline Hersant also relates theatre and text, giving an ingenious account of the late plays’ formalist properties (and their use of rhetorical hypotyposis, in a literal and figurative sense), even though she strains a little at times to relate this to the ‘other’ theatre she identifies, that of mental and memorial space. Delphine Lemonnier-Texier, under ‘Effets de genre’, offers a more conventional reading of Beckett’s ghostly pieces, relating them via motif (ghosts, skulls) and — less convincingly — formal structure to Shakespearian tragedy; while Florence Godeau in the section ‘Présence et absence’ makes a more sturdy examination of the concept of the ghostly in Beckett, in a good introduction to the plays with fresh insights. Mireille Bousquet, in turn, offers elegant but somewhat familiar reflections on the pragmatics of time and the ‘unsayable’ in That Time and other late works. Under ‘Voix’, Lea Sinoimeri engages directly the works’ bilingual status, in an undemonstrative but revealing reading of Beckett’s late work as a theatre of voice and audition with links to both ancient tragedy and post-dramatic theatre. Finally, Llewellyn Brown gives a thorough close reading of Berceuse (Rockaby), underpinned by some underdeveloped but suggestive gestures towards Lacan and others, and gaining momentum in the bracing theoretical account of the play’s final rejection of life. The Avant-propos establishes a somewhat reverential attitude towards Beckett’s late work, described rather wildly as the ‘sommet de son art’, and the collection presents itself as a way of knowing and appreciating better these ‘créations’. It is, then, for the most part aimed less at the seasoned Beckett scholar than at a general reader. It is, however, a volume of sensible scope and frequent insight, a welcome addition to only a small body of criticism on this work considered as a corpus.