Waiting for Death: the Philosophical Significance of Beckett's "En attendant Godot" by Ramona Cormier and Janis L. Pallister (review)

Book Reviews stronger than the one-, two-, and three-place predicate possibilités to which the analysis in terms of logical propositions has been limited. The papers Cook gathers together range from the early discussions of case grammar as modifications of Chomsky's deep syntactic structure, to the deployment of the model for the treatment of universal semantic issues. Especially illustrative of the latter is paper 12, the 1975 "Durative Aspect: The Process of No Change," which demonstrates the intersection between case grammar and modal logic. Most of the papers deal with the various stages in the development of Fillmore's model, with particular reference to major elaborations and modifications proposed by the works of Chafe and Anderson, and with the application of case grammar to specific problems like the durative aspect and verb classification. One paper, number 11, the 1975 "Stylistics: Measuring Style Complexity," deals with a topic of interest to literary and rhetorical studies, although like many papers interfacing linguistics and literature, there is the risk that it may be taken as a model of adequate literary criticism: such analyses need to be incorporated into a model of metacriticism in order truly to be said to be contributions to literary stylistics. In the absence of any cohesive agreement as to syntactic and semantic models, Cook's contributions will continue to provide suggestive lines of linguistic inquiry. DAVID WILLIAM FOSTER, Arizona State University Ramona Cormier, and Janis L. Pallister, Waitingfor Death: the Philosophical Significance of Beckett's "En attendant Godot". University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1979. 155 p. $13.75. The author's goal in the writing of this study was two-fold: to arrive at an understanding of Beckett's world-view through a close literary and philosophical analysis of his play En attendant Godot and to evaluate the large body of criticism devoted to it. Fortunately, the evaluative component is relegated, for the most part, to the extensive footnotes, while the main body of the text is concerned with a discussion of the play itself. The analysis is exhaustive and meticulous. Yet, despite an occasional abrupt transition or dwelling on the obvious, the presentation is persuasive , entertaining, and enlightening. Emphasis is placed on Beckett's allembracing nihilism with its tenets of man's physical and mental weaknesses (incarnated by Estragon and Vladimir, respectively), moral confusion, egoism, inability to communicate, longing for solitude and yet desperate need of others. Death is the ultimate conclusion to a meaningless existence, but the characters are fearfully unable to see in death the liberation offered by nothingness. Instead, they do what they can to escape the thought of death, muitiplying their foolish games and vaudeville routines as a sort of Pascalian divertissement, a way of filling life's daily void. They hopelessly await an illusory salvation in the figure of Godot who, for Cormier and Pallister, represents not so much God as "a symbol of man's futile hope, which constitutes a motivation, feeble though it may be, for 'continuing'" ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW273 Book Reviews (p. 36). Continue the characters do, but in the course of the play one senses an increasing disintegration of social structures (cf. Pozzo's helpless blindness and Lucky's bestial muteness), values, and interpersonal relationships. The only possibilities of escape from the universal "mess" which Beckett forces his audience to see lie in literary creation itself and in the sardonic laugh which detaches us from the tragedy of the human condition by making us recognize its fundamental absurdity. JAMES P. GILROY, University of Denver Malcolm Cowley. The Dream of the Golden Mountains: Remembering the 1930s. New York: The Viking Press, 1980. 317 p. Malcolm Cowley's newest book is a personal account of the complicated motives behind the political radicalization of American writers and intellectuals during the early years of the Great Depression. The book alternates chapters describing the public events Cowley wrote about for The New Republic magazine, such as the 1931 Harlan County Kentucky coal strikes and the 1932 Bonus Army march on Washington, with chapters describing encounters with literary groups prominent in the era. Cowley writes with insight of the Southern Agrarians , urban intellectuals active in John Reed clubs, the League ofAmerican Writers...