Samuel Beckett in the Literary Marketplace (review)

Stephen Dilks's account of Samuel Beckett's relationship to the literary marketplace seeks to deprive us of our received understanding of Beckett as a writer who was both indifferent to fame and uninterested in money. For Dilks, Beckett has been raised to the status of a secular saint and this book is dedicated to a revisionist account of his wheelings and dealings in the marketplace. Dilks's main claim is that we have been rather too precious in our styling of a "hagiographic myth" of Beckett as a pure artiste (37), an intuition that followed from early ruminations on Beckett's relationship to photography, which suggested he was a rather more savvy operator in the public sphere than he had been given credit for. The result is the present account of Beckett's literary affairs from the 1920s until the end of his writing career.

As someone who has been using the various "floating head" images of Beckett as a way to think about his relationship to history, I feel an instinctive sympathy with Dilks's main claim. No one can deny that for a long time many of the things that Dilks wants to talk about—fame, money, and audience—were viewed through the lens of Beckett's peculiar distaste for such things. And there is a sense, too, that meeting Beckett was a profound experience that might make certain of these rather indiscreet issues difficult to talk about. Dilks's attempts to correct these oversights have, however, been controversial. Jean-Michel Rabaté describes the book as an "impertinent portrait," and its publication was considerably delayed by the Beckett Estate's blanket refusal of permission to quote from any correspondence published or otherwise.

In principle, it seems to me, the project has value, but the manner in which it came to be carried out might have damaged it irreparably. For one thing, there is the issue of methodology. Given that Pierre Bourdieu, for example, has done so much work on precisely the kinds of transactions this book is concerned with, it seems a pity that he was not used to provide a theoretical framework within which to trace the economics of Beckett's cultural production. Without some kind of theoretical frame, the book routinely degenerates into a sparring match between Dilks, referring to a letter in which Beckett betrays an interest in money, and some implied other who has claimed that Beckett didn't really care about money at all. It is hard not to feel that one is being dragged into an unseemly argument, and Bourdieu's work, particularly his take on avant-garde cultural production, offers at least one way to sophisticate the terms of the argument that Beckett's perceived anti-commercialism was a marketing strategy.

There is the issue, too, of false teleologies. Dilks's project leads him to sustained readings of the various photographs taken by John Minihan, Jerry Bauer, and others that, he says, provide evidence of Beckett's management of a public persona. Many of these were taken after Beckett was already established, of course, and yet they are routinely taken as evidence of Beckett's situation/ disposition at a much earlier period. Bauer's 1973 photograph of Beckett sitting amongst trash in an alleyway, for example, is made the subject of an extended analysis in chapter two that works backwards until the image comes to seem the inevitable end of a process of self-representation that Beckett had been cultivating since the 1920s. Problems of retrospection and pre-disposition abound in this account of Beckett's "strategic reinforcement of a public image" (72). One is reminded of Michael Serres's warning that one can "always proceed from product to its conditions, but never from the conditions to the product." It feels like over-reaching, and it inevitably undermines the case Dilks is seeking to make.

These methodological issues are compounded by problems of tone. Given the Estate's decision, one might understand Dilks to be somewhat sore...