Beckett after Beckett (review)

Few modern writers command a literary stamp as distinct as Samuel Beckett's, yet the starkness that characterizes the Beckettian imaginary (particularly in the theater), however familiar, leaves intentions elusive, messages opaque. Possibilities proliferate without resolution: "No symbols where none intended," Beckett famously writes. Hence the frustration of the uninitiated student who, after half completing an essay on the most obvious topic at hand—to determine if Godot is God or not—has the midnight epiphany that nothing guarantees a Godot exists in the first place, or that this existence is, ultimately, the point.

Beckett after Beckett traces a critical profile that remains as rich in possibilities, and ultimately as inscrutable, as the author's no-show Godot. To open the collection of articles, many by well regarded scholars in the field, editors S. E. Gontarski and Anthony Uhlmann reprint a 1949 letter from Beckett to Georges Duthuit in which the author throws down the gauntlet to those who would characterize him, his work, or his thought in critical discourse. After generally refusing "relations" (a word that encompasses representation more generally) Beckett declares, bluntly, "I cannot write about." He nonetheless concludes by deploying the repudiated preposition in a somewhat coy riddle: "I who speak little of myself hardly speak about anything else." The editors accommodate Beckett's competing affirmations by proposing not to chisel a likeness or erect a funerary monument, but rather to gather "after-images," a term perhaps carefully chosen for its philosophical (Bergsonian/Deleuzian) resonance as something that precedes meaning and interpretation as a more direct impression on the mind that perceives it. Beckett's impression on any of the diverse critics often has little in common with the other shades of the author and his work that haunt this collection.

Bruno Clément's survey of a "natural history of the critical gesture" (117) in Beckett criticism directly addresses the project announced in the title. This essay's central situation in the anthology might appear to anchor the other contributors' varied approaches. Where early critics (Bataille, Blanchot, Robbe-Grillet) "ventriloquized" Beckett, restating his aphorisms in similar language and effectively consolidating notions of the "Beckettian," Clément observes a new wave of criticism that emerges after Beckett's death, in which critics such as Anzieu, Deleuze, and Badiou invoke Beckett's texts as material in support of their own diverse systems of thought. Beckett refracts into figures that often have little to do with each other as writers shape the author in the image of their own disciplines and pre-occupations. Clément notes that "this kind of discourse made him [Beckett] shrug his shoulders, when it did not make him flee" (129). While he does not challenge the validity of these approaches, Clément identifies a newer wave in the emergence of a different voice in critical writings, that of the critics themselves as author-subjects who encounter a common object in Beckett's oeuvre. Criticism is reconsidered as a literary gesture, a meditation on reading and writing, specifically of the first-person subject, that positions the critics' voice alongside that of Beckett's own narrators.

Certainly, Clément's taxonomy would characterize some of the contributions. In one of two reflections on atmosphere and environment in Beckett (the first by Stephen Connor), Paul Davies considers Beckett through the lens of eco-criticism, identifying "a revolutionized domicile, an oecos of no-walls" (77) that is, perhaps, primarily a discerning reflection of eco-poetics held up to a Beckettian mirror. In Luce Irigaray's exploration of the encounter with the "other," the reference to Beckett seems little more than a nod in his direction. Her elevation of sexuate difference to "the most universal and paradigmatic difference" that precedes all others and is located at "the most basic and sublime crossroads between body and spirit" (50) is not only bound to surprise, if not outrage, some readers (especially those familiar only with her earlier writings), but would also represent a conscription of Beckett to a system of thought that has...