Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Criticism ed. by Ruby Cohn (review)

Book Reviews • SAMUEL BECKETT: A COLLECTION OF CRITICISM, ed. Ruby Cohn. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975. xvi & 138 pp. $2.45. Beckett studies have reached such a point of sophistication and abundance that, though the subject remains absorbing, it is now the variety of approaches to that subject which stimulates renewed interest. This is especially so in reading this volume of essays printed for the first time at the invitation of the editor. The "inexhaustible" quality of Beckett, evinced by Professor Cohn in her introduction , is evident in the range of essays from the anecdotal and biographical piece by Kay Boyle to the dense but highly suggestive fusion by Ludovic Janvier of problems of narration and problems of space in Beckett's major fiction. Though Janvier's difficult prose is seldom elucidated by the accompanying paradigm, a careful re-reading of his essays moves one from preoccupation with structure to an insight into the spiritual dimension to which that structure alludes. Thus, the final section of this piece is entitled "The Temple," referring to "the textual temple cut out of and again enclosed in the vast ever-open space of world-language." One is tempted to group Janvier's essay on narration with Hugh Kenner's on syntax. Here again, the critic finds in the formal ordering of a paragraph, or even a phrase, an entire aesthetic - an aesthetic which precludes the possibility of ultimate order. The articles by Janvier and Kenner should not only be widely read but also closely studied. Other well-known Beckett critics represented in this volume are John Fletcher and Alec Reid. Fletcher provides a much needed revaluation of Beckett's poetry, as well as an analysis which helpfully provides analogies with the poetry of T.S. Eliot, especially in his use of Dante. Alec Reid offers personal responses to the major plays right up to Not I, eschewing definitive "interpretations" all along but making evident as well that he is closely attuned to the effects created by Beckett's theatre and the sensibility which has created those effects. After reading Alec Reid we may be on our guard against accepting all of 423 424 BOOK REVIEWS Hersh Zeifman's interpretations of the plays on the basis of religious imagery; but his assertions are so carefully considered and scrupulously substantiated that we must agree with his conclusion that "Beckett's plays 'claw' because they set off haunting reverberations, because each of the elements of his drama invariably suggests so much more than it at first seems to. And it is precisely this wedding of the implicit with the explicit that provides Beckett's drama with its extraordinary religious density, the wellspring of both its beauty and its power." Many of the papers in this collection effect the wedding of elements which is the keynote of much of Beckett's art: narrative point of view with spiritual perspective , syntactic order with artisitic vision and (in a piece by Elin Diamond) fiction with drama. Jan Hokenson weds Beckett's fictional technique to Beethoven's music in an article which borrows the term "large black pauses" from Beckett's own early work. And the analogies of Beckett's work with the other arts is made even more specific in Dougald McMillan's "Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts: The Embarrassment of Allegory". This piece is especially helpful because of all the information it provides regarding the particular paintings which have influenced Beckett in a lifetime filled with reflection upon the history of the visual arts and the plight ofliterature (in the words of a letter Beckett wrote in 1937) "left behind on that old stale path which has been long abandoned by music and painting." Articles by H. Porter Abbott and Yasunari Takahashi explore the origins and development of Beckett's comic sense from two points of view. The former concentrates on the early fiction and makes an interesting case for Bram Stoker's Dracula as a possible source for Watt. Takahashi traces the development of the figure of the fool from Beckett's earliest fiction through to some recent drama and suggests that the fool represents Beckett's reaction to the Cartesian rationalism of the modern age which...