Samuel Beckett and the Postcolonial Novel (review)

Patrick Bixby's Samuel Beckett and the Postcolonial Novel is a remarkably insightful and erudite study treating a fascinating array of Beckett's novels from his long-unpublished first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932), to his famous "trilogy" published in French and English between 1951 and 1958. To say that the book represents an important new contribution to Beckett studies—which it undoubtedly does—is to risk selling it significantly short, however. It seems important to emphasize at the outset that even readers not deeply versed in Beckett or Beckett studies—or in postcolonial studies—stand to gain much from this highly readable and thought-provoking account.

Bixby makes a strong case for considering Beckett's interrogations of the form of the novel in relation to the historical and intellectual contexts marking Ireland's somewhat precocious entry into postcoloniality in 1922. Unlike earlier treatments of Beckett's Irishness such as John Harrington's The Irish Beckett or Eoin O'Brien's The Beckett Country, however, Bixby does not focus primarily on discerning Irish referents running through Beckett's fiction. He instead reflects on the ways that the form of Beckett's novels registers the fissures in modern subjectivity that the historical and ideological tensions of postcoloniality lay increasingly bare.

Bixby pursues this argument in a manner that draws equally from modernist studies, postcolonial studies, and Beckett studies while emphasizing the shared stakes and overlapping concerns for each field. He offers cogent and accessible accounts of postcolonial theory that he then combines with a sophisticated treatment of the history of the novel, analyses of modernist narrations of subjectivity, and a reconsideration of the relationship between the novel and the nation. Much of the book's significant value thus arguably lies in its methodological model. Though an engagement with empire and its legacies has become an important focus of modernist studies, approaches to "transnational" or "global" modernism too often fail to place the concerns of postcolonial studies on an equal footing. This imbalance tends to produce analyses marked by a noticeable critical remove and occasional condescension and ultimately muffles the impact of the new modernist studies by rendering the complexity of new or differently inflected modernist practices from colonial or former colonial spaces less perceptible.

Addressing the widespread assessment that Beckett's work is politically and historically disengaged, Bixby focuses on Georg Lukács's well-known reading of Beckett's writing as one marked by bourgeois abstraction and a retreat into interiority. Bixby argues this perception has only been reinforced by existentialist and poststructuralist readings that have characterized successive generations of Beckett criticism. He offers a compelling alternative view foregrounding Beckett's ironic relationship to the European bildungsroman by way of a lucid distillation of the theories of minor literature and minority discourse advanced by Deleuze and Guattari and developed by David Lloyd. Bixby thus reads Beckett's "failed" bildungsromane as strategic interventions within a "dissenting postcolonial modernism" (37) that disrupt "the teleological movement from savagery to civility, otherness to sameness" (39).

Challenging the critical tendency to dismiss Dream of Fair to Middling Women as mere juvenilia, Bixby intriguingly explores how the novel re-works juvenility both thematically and formally to interrupt a narrative emphasis on development. To support this reading, he connects analyses of Beckett's parody of Joyce's Portrait with an insightful critique of Dream's own remarkable interpellations of literary criticism and reflections on the history of the novel as revealed through figures such as Austen, Balzac, Dickens, Stendahl, and Flaubert. In this way, Bixby uses this often overlooked first novel to show Beckett positioning himself in relation to both a European and an Irish novel tradition so as to question the authority and coherence of each.

Developing this argument, Bixby reads Murphy (1938) as a text that "links a vision of the unsettling conditions of postcolonial displacement with a revision of the European novel of formation" (88). Rather than the arrested development of Dream or a more generalized modernist alienation...