Samuel Beckett: Out of the Archive: An Introduction

A generation younger than the other great modernists, Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) is currently playing catch-up. His afterlife has barely begun, even while the publication of W. B. Yeats's Collected Letters continues, the final volume of Virginia Woolf's essays has just been published, and James Joyce has just escaped from European copyright, promising a flurry of new, commercially driven editions.¹ By contrast, the first volume of Beckett's Letters was published only in 2009, and the second, reviewed here by John Pilling, in 2011. His German diaries, written in 1936-37, are to be published in 2015, and a previously unpublished short story is imminent from Faber. Beckett was a copious compiler of reading notes, and many fragments of unknown material are flowing rapidly "out of the archive." This special issue itself contains a translation of an essay by Beckett not available for sixty years, and fragments of another formerly accessible only to scholars and francophone readers.

Beckett is an archivist's author. Storing his proofs, drafts, diaries, and notebooks for up to sixty years, the author has left textual remains that document his development as a writer in great detail. These are held in numerous libraries—public, academic, and private—but are also steadily becoming available to a wider audience via publications in print and online.² Their use in academic research is burgeoning, and images of manuscripts are now included even in the standard readers' editions of his works. Equally, he thinks in archival forms. Krapp's Last Tape depicts someone who records, stores, and orders information for regular recall; Malone Dies is born, the reader infers, from the notebook left by its dead protagonist; and Rough for Radio II relates the transcription of a captive's pained speech for later analysis. With this in mind, this special issue assays the value of the archive: it ponders the merits of archival remains, including offcuts, first drafts, notes, proofs, correspondence, and assesses the worth of the research that this material allows.

Beckett reliably deprecates the value of his writing. The letters to Thomas McGreevy play ceaselessly on the execrable and excremental worth of his literary efforts, and a letter of August 1931 to Charles Prentice implies that a well-crafted work would be nothing more than a well-turned turd, "twice round the pan & pointed at both ends."³ Similarly, the later lament that "every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness," suggests something spilt or leaked, as if writing were an effluent.⁴ But the ferocious negation that resounds in Beckett's oeuvre so troubles the basis of value that the valueless becomes valuable, failure becomes success, and each might, at any moment and recursively, turn into its antithesis. Failing may be bettered or worsened—if they were ever different options—and there may be no more economical way to spend words than by wasting them.

The same ambiguity that sees failure as a form of success characterizes the value of the archive itself. For the archive is prefigured in one of Beckett's most iconic—and thus valued—props: an ashcan. An archive is a dumping ground, where unpublished documents and unwanted scraps reside while final drafts and unabandoned works fill bookshelves, newspapers, examinations, and readers. The archive's content is that which the author casts off as inessential, whether sold on or donated. But the process of archiving—of taking these resources in—is primarily one of a reversal very much like those found in Beckett's work. The archive sees by-products and exuviae as its special treasure. Responding to Beckett's statement to Jacoba van Velde that "There are two moments worthwhile in writing; the one where you start and the other where you throw it in the waste-paper basket" the archivist must add a third: when it is fished back out.⁵ For the archive has the eye of all those disdained and now defunct trades: the night soil man, the rag-and-bone man, or even the soap maker, who would collect ash for lye. What is no longer of...