Introduction to Samuel Beckett, "The New Object"

"The New Object" was originally published in the catalogue of the Samuel M. Kootz Gallery in New York, in 1948. The occasion for the catalogue's issue was an exhibition, Introducing Two Modern French Painters: Geer Van Velde, Bram Van Velde, held from 8 to 27 March, and the essay has been unavailable to a wide audience since that time. It constitutes a translation of roughly three quarters of the French essay "Peintres de l'empêchement," omitting the first long paragraph, and has numerous interesting differences. The English text was published three months before the French, which was included in the June 1948 issue of Derrière le miroir, the journal of the Galerie Maeght in Paris. It was Beckett's second essay on the work of either of the Van Velde brothers, following "La peinture des van Veldes, ou le Monde et le Pantalon" (1946), and preceding the Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (1949). It anticipates the later work by identifying a shift in the artist's task from expression to the statement of expression's impossibility, asking, "What remains to be represented if the essence of object is to elude representation? There remain to be represented the conditions of that elusion."

There has been some disagreement over the translator of the English text. In their 1970 bibliography, Federman and Fletcher state that the text is "translated into English by an anonymous translator (not the author)," while Ackerley and Gontarski suggest that Beckett is responsible.² Ruby Cohn remains uncommitted with "Possibly by Beckett."³ None of them present any textual evidence for their claims. The Kootz catalogue mentions no translator, and so poses as a work without a foreign language precursor, needing only the concluding "Samuel Beckett. Paris. March." The degree of difference between English and French texts, however, strongly suggests that the translation is Beckett's own work.

The surviving typescript of the French essay, held at Dartmouth College, shows the change from "Le Nouvel Object" to "Peintres de l'empêchement," revealing that the title used by the English text is the earlier. The typescript is dated to March 1947, a full year before "The New Object" was published, and fifteen months before the French text emerged. Although there are roughly twenty small alterations and corrections, there are no substantial changes between typescript and final French essay, suggesting the completed text waited over a year for publication. Similarly, comparison of the "Peintres" typescript and "The New Object" shows that the English translation was probably based on the text that stood before the author's corrections, which include the change of title. The typescript contains Beckett's change from "recherche" to "deuil"; a change retained for the published French text, which reads: "Une assurance, une double assurance, car le même deuil les mène loin l'un de l'autre, de deuil de l'objet."⁴ "The New Object," however, carries the earlier sense and offers "An assurance, a double assurance. For they go very different ways, on the same search, the search for an object." This change shifts the meaning from the search for a missing object (English) to its mourning (French), and so to the impossibility of its recovery, very much "turning from [the field of the possible] in disgust" (D, 139) rather than resisting or denying that impossibility.

Other curiosities ought to be noted, however. The odd translation of "deux attitudes liées l'une à l'autre, comme le repos à l'effort" (D, 135) as "two attitudes are bound together, turn in turn fatigue and rest" introduces an uncomfortable foreign note, where "turn and turn about" would be the more usual phrase. Indeed, this is the expression used repeatedly in the sucking stones episode of Molloy, where it appears to be something of a favorite for the narrator.⁵ But the strangeness of the catalogue text is compounded by the fact that the phrase is a not-quite idiomatic non-translation of a non-idiom. Indeed, for the English language audience, this determined oddity may have hinted at a French original, despite its clumsiness being easily avoidable. The French...