Beckett and Beyond (review)

222Comparative Drama artists have been experimenting with new ideas and interpretations that inquire into Greek politics and culture in the twenty-first century. Gonda van Steen's book is both a pleasure to read and an instructive manual for the discussion of Greek theater within its performative and cultural contexts . Her complex methodology shifts with dexterity from performance theory to classical scholarship and from feminism to popular culture and cultural studies . As van Steen herself notes in her epilogue, she has mapped and charted the way for more explorers' and interpreters' journeys into the territories of Greek culture and performance. KiKi Gounaridou Smith College Bruce Stewart, ed. Beckett and Beyond. Proceedings ofthe Princess Grace Irish Library in Monaco, 17-20 May 1991. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1999. Pp. viii + 278. $65.00. Appearing some years after the conference that provided the forum for this eclectic gathering of essays, Beckett and Beyond has the curious task of putting its own title to the test. Given the recent biographies of Beckett by Anthony Cronin and James Knowlson, along with the usual stream of periodical literature offering the latest interpretive strategies by various critics over the past decade, much indeed has appeared"beyond"what appears in this volume. However , as the Monaco conference attracted many ofthe most notable Beckett scholars from America and Europe, much interesting recent work in Beckett studies appears here in its nascent state and therefore provides a glimpse of a crucible from which important approaches emerge. Beyond what? Presumably the conference convened in the wake of the writer's death in 1988 to pose the question of what might happen to Beckett's plays as well as to some of his prose pieces once his formidable presence had disappeared. The collection, however, hardly delivers on the title since it mixes into heady compound papers on everything from gender in Beckett to comparisons with other writers (Camus, Havel, Leopardi) to philosophical issues ranging from phenomenological readings of texts to speech act theory to Deluezean rhizomatics. And while there is merit in bringing together work on Beckett's prose work alongside papers on his plays, the lack ofeffort in arranging the essays by related topics also exacerbates the inconsistent quality of the collection and elides the important differences that Beckett himself saw in his roles as a fiction writer and playwright. Moreover, the papers range in length Reviews223 from a single page to over fifteen pages, and so an uneven quality of depth is apparent as well. However, once one accepts the capricious disposition ofthe individual essays , the volume provides an interesting range of approaches to Beckett. Linda Ben-Zvi's essay, "Feminine Focus in Beckett," presages the book she later edited on the same topic by pointing to the gendered nature ofkey Beckettian themes and actions—waiting, self-fragmentation, and the like—and argues that, in a sense, all ofBeckett's dramatispersonae can be construed as feminine. Ben-Zvi, establishing remarkable range with this rather simple notion, notes how it extends beyond a depiction of characters with "intrinsic" feminine qualities to the level of Beckett's language, which she characterizes as a form of feminine "semiotic" writing of the type theorized by Julia Kristeva. (Ben-Zvi also wins the hearts of Beckett scholars everywhere by remarking in a footnote—which one hopes was enunciated in the paper's presentation—that Kristeva's own celebrated work on Beckett remains "unattuned" because "she misses all his humor " [15].) Interest ofanother kind is generated with Kevin Dettmar's polemical essay "The Joyce that Beckett Built," which argues that Beckett has "exerted a profound influence on the way we think and write about Joyce" (78), not so much through the seminal essays for the 1929 festschrift on Finnegans Wake ("Dante . .. Bruno.Vico ... Joyce") orthe 1931 bookon Proust. Instead, theorizes Dettmar, Beckett suffered (in the most manifest form, it seems) from the anxiety ofinfluence proposed by Harold Bloom. Under the dire influence of Joyce's shadow, says Dettmar, Beckett launched in a 1956 interview a "paradigm for reading twentieth-centuryliterature and writing twentieth-centuryliteraryhistory" (86) by providing a comparative schematic for interpreting his own work as the opposite ofJoyce's (the famous tag line ofthe...