The Cambridge Companion to Beckett ed. by John Pilling (review)

Book Reviews 24[ in London"and New York. While members of his multi-ethnic troupe met the challenge and perfected their skills, they had to resist the demands of national ists for folk and racial alignments. Although Walcott had always sought a unique blend of foreign and local influences, tensions only increased as the Workshop's reputation spread. As in any stormy love affair, it is often beneficial for all parties involved (0 explore separate paths. By 1976, it was necessary for Walcott to pursue his own career and for key members of ~e Workshop to carry on without his direct involvement. I;>espite sincere effort on both sides, reconciliation did not occur until the early 19905. The SlOry of the Trinidad Theatre Workshop involves a list of prominent influences in modem theatrical history that extends well beyond West Indian boundaries: Bertolt Brecht, Tennessee Williams, Joseph Papp, Galt MacDermot, Akira Kurosawa, the Royal Shakespeare Company, to mention only a few. Nevertheless, this small band of thoroughly committed artists remained true to their Caribbean roots. As King makes clear, Walcott and his troupe enjoyed the privilege of helping to define and shape an emerging regional culture during a period of volatile political change. Not only is the story itself interesting, but King's treatment might well provide a model for similar studies of theatrical movements in other nascent societies. ROBERT HAMNER, HARDIN-SIMMONS UNIVERSITY JOHN PIllING, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Beckett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press t994· pp. 249· $59·95; $[6.95 (PB). John Pilling's collection of essays on Beckett is sound and conscientiously thorough, although one could hardly call it lively. The thirteen authors are noted Beckett scholars , and they take up topics both frequently addressed (the major plays, the English fiction , the trilogy of novels, the late plays, the bilingualism) and less frequently addressed (the essays, the poetry, the aesthetic philosophy). "Companion" strikes me as a problematic word in [his title; it is not clear to whom the companionship is being offered. (Certainly this Companion has not been "devised for company" as Beckett's narrator devises Company.) Since most of the essays merely rehearse what one already knows about this play or that novel (assuming that "one" has read a lot of Beckett as well as a lot of Beckett criticism), my supposition is that its intended audience is sophisticated undergraduates and graduate students interested in literature rather than theory (which is, happily, absent, as is its accompanying jargon). The arguments of many of the essays and the intellectual assumptions behind them frequently seem too learned for undergraduates, and the tone is often severely academic. These faults are not true of Michael Worton's essay, a superb introduction to the two masterworks in "Waiting for Godor and Endgame: theatre as text," in which he discusses the major issues of theme and language, nor of Jonathan Kal'b's easy-to-read survey of Beckett's experiments in the other media in "The mediated Quixote: the radio and television plays, and Film." Book Reviews The most vivid, powerful essays - that is. those I enjoyed reading both because they taught me something new and were so well written - are those by H. Porter Abbon and Keir Elam. Abbott's "Beginning again: the post-narrative art of Tex(sjor nothing and How it is" asserts that "Beckett's deliberate abandonment of the very practice that had worked so well in the trilogy ... its masterful deployment of the quest" was necessary to "save his art" and create the "radical newness" of Texts, and goes on to show how How it is, a travestied epic, is part of the same project of dismantling narrative expectations. Abbott's belief that the function or language is to express the largest, deepest problems is supported by his own rich and very readable prose. Elam's essay, "Dead heads: damnation -narration in the 'dramaticules,to, argues that Beckett's tiny late plays "constitute ... the most intense and disquieting body of texts conceived for the twentieth-century stage." He identifies the Dantean imagery of the tete-morte in Not I and then traces it through six of the drarnaticules which followed, using Gustave Dare's illustrations for...