10 Ways of Thinking about Samuel Beckett: The Falsetto of Reason by Enoch Brater (review)

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari open their summa, What Is Philosophy? with an admission that so sweeping a question “can perhaps be posed only late in life, with the arrival of old age and the time for speaking correctly” (1). The issue of “old age” aside, the suggestion seems to be that some books can only be written late in one’s career, after a lifetime of contemplating the issues and with “the time for speaking correctly” at hand. 10 Ways of Thinking about Samuel Beckett: The Falsetto of Reason is one such book by a scholar who has spent his professional life reading, re-reading, and dissecting the work of Samuel Beckett, and, like many of us, maturing (we hope) through that process. It is less a critical monograph, if we think of such as representing something of a breakthrough in research, than a series of meditations, a return to first principles and a pushing forward into new syntheses, new ways of thinking, particularly about the art of Samuel Beckett. It is, thus, both a book for beginners, since one always returns to first principles, and one for seasoned readers of Beckett, who are rewarded by those frequent references and allusions to Beckett’s work that draw knowing nods from the cognoscenti, those who find it impossible not to leaven their conversation (and their prose, for that matter) with Beckett quotations. And these musings are pure Brater, by which I mean, not insights dependent on the latest critical fashions or theories, but profound observations by one of the closest readers in the Beckett business (which it has become, by the by), “sometimes ‘demented’ perspectives” that, he admits, may be “[e]ccentric at times” (3). Brater lets his critical mask slip on occasion to reveal something of that “pure Brater”: “And like all great masters, Beckett is both an artist representative of his time and one who stands apart from it. (I know we’re not supposed to talk about ‘great masters’ any more, but what are you supposed to do with Beckett? Subject him to ‘commodification’ and say ‘that’s it’?)” The question remains rhetorical, of course, but not the “rhetorical questions without the rhetoric,” a quip from Beckett adopted by Brater (3), uncredited but from Beckett’s review of his friend Denis Devlin’s poetry. Brater’s rhetorical question front-loads the rhetoric, however, here unapologetic and decisive: in a critical climate that may denigrate the idea of “great masters,” Beckett, the exception in most matters, remains one.

The 10 Ways of Thinking about Samuel Beckett are actually ten distinct (and distinctive) essays, loosely held together by the recurrent theme of Beckett’s being an author of his time and an author for all time. Many of us in the field have read or heard these essays before, now arranged so that the details cited “steadily accumulate” (15). Some of the essays appear here with only slight alterations: “From Dada to Didi: Beckett and the Art of His Century” is from Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui (2006); “Talk about Landscapes: What There Is to Recognize” is from Modern Drama (2006), altered to “Beckett’s Landscapes: What There Is to Recognize”;and “Beckett’s Devious Interventions, or Fun with Cube Roots,” is a talk delivered at and podcast from the Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies symposiums at Oxford University in June 2010. Other essays on Beckett and Romanticism, Beckett and Ibsen, and the seated figure on Beckett’s stage, fill out the volume. But like many such collections, the essays gain with the revisions for and the juxtapositions that result from book publication.

The collection ends fittingly with a return to beginnings, or to Brater’s beginnings with Beckett in the 1970s. He tells an anecdote about editor Maurice Beebe’s 1974 issue of the Journal of Modern Literature, dedicated to the shifting critical climate, “From Modernism to Post-Modernism.” Brater’s contribution was...