How Beckett Fails, Once More with Music

Daniel Albright, Beckett and Aesthetics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. vii + 179 pp. $60.

Promoting Beckett's later pieces for the stage, screen, and radio can be hard work. These moments of inaction, taking place in fuzzy, gray-lit zones, where sounds are barely audible and, when heard, barely understood—are they really good theater? Uncertainty on this score is one reason, I think, that the production of Beckett's later work has acquired its aura of sacramental mystery. It's a kind of trade-off. What you worship you don't necessarily have to like. The downside is that, as in the solemn reading of Holy Writ, the burden of religious obligation adds its own special weight to the effort to keep one's mind from wandering to pastimes of greater pleasure—like, say, mowing the lawn. Critics have compounded this difficulty of reception by insisting on Beckett's intuitive grasp of any medium, his unerring capacity to find its beating heart and turn it to his artistic advantage. They have insisted on this when, in fact, it's plain for all to see that Beckett makes a mess of it every time. Unerringly, he does not take advantage of what these various media have to offer but rather proceeds like someone just beginning to understand what we all learned long ago. His short plays are talky and uneventful; his television, gray and grainy; his film, black and white and melodramatic. In his earlier work, when Beckett openly broadcast the themes of failure and incompetence, deploying hapless characters and a constancy of acerbic wit, the failure and the art all seemed somehow to hold together. But when the characters are dissolved and the humor dried to a bone, what is left? Where is the art? Is it art? Was it ever? Was it ever even meant to be?

In his wonderful and genuinely revisionist new book, Beckett and Aesthetics, Daniel Albright makes a powerful case for the argument that what is exposed so unavoidably in the late works is what Beckett was most keenly trying to do all along: "this was Beckett's way with every artistic medium that he worked in: to foreground the medium, to thrust it in the spectator's face, by showing its inadequacy, its refusal to be wrenched to any good artistic purpose" (1). This is what Albright means by "Beckett's aesthetics." It is why his "late fiction is intensely televisual, whereas his television plays recede from television into a sort of sensory deprivation tank" (134-35). What this means historically is that "Beckett's early translations of the Surrealists were . . . as important to his artistic development as his critical studies of Proust and Joyce" (10). Accordingly, Albright devotes a rich introductory chapter of his book to Beckett's instinctive affinity with the Surrealist effort to expose the machinery behind the artistic facade. So close is the kinship that Beckett's late text Worstward Ho (1983) is the last and perhaps purest product of "the great age of Surrealist writing" (17). But what this also means is that the failure Beckett wore like a badge lay "not with Beckett the particular artist but with art itself, always at the mercy of decomposing and perverse media" (8). It is an argument that chimes with Gilles Deleuze's pivotal 1992 contention (credited enthusiastically by Albright) that Beckett's is an art of exhaustion—exhaustion, that is, not of the artist but of his resources.¹

One corollary to this argument is that "[t]echnology provided Beckett with more possibilities for unfiguring things than words ever could" (137). Whether or not this is meant to imply that the prose fiction Beckett kept writing all his life was really the lesser craft, impoverished in its capacity for impoverishment, Albright features the scripted work. Accordingly, the two magnificent chapters that make up the long middle of this study cover, first, Beckett's [End Page...