Back to Beckett by Ruby Cohn (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 395 each new attempt at evolving a dramatic language, but it is interesting to see that Shaw shared with Eliot and Arden the need to dip into "the imaginary museum" of earlier manners of stage speech: not in order that the text might control enactment as Raymond Williams once urged, but to range over the wide spectrum of styles between verisimilutude and the abstract. Whether by trivial conversation or parodistic patterns of speech and song, each seized his freedom of choice at once to control an audience's image of the play and self-consciously to express a personal feeling towards his theme. Shaw recognized his atavistic tactics, which on occasion could sink to Dickensian costume-speech (Pygamlion's Doolittle) or rise to an operatic afflatus of parody (Major Barbara, Man and Superman) most appropriate to "the great tradition of comedy." As for John Arden, in his search for a popular, pre-literary dialogue capable ofa kind of poetic energy, he pillaged the museum for archaism and pastiche, achieving a quasi-Shakespearian mixture of rough verse and coarser prose. Eliot also made conscious selections from the museum, juggling the language of liturgy with that of drawing-room comedy, pulled by the various ritualisms of the past in seeking a dialogue for the present. Curiously, he also hit upon the dramatic effectiveness of meaningless cliche and evasion, a discovery more resolutely exploited by Beckett and Pinter. Beckett tries for the limits of expressiveness in minimal speech, and Kennedy argues that "the whole texture of Beckett 's language is created out of his ever-renewed sense of the failure of language" (p. 135) as he found stage forms for an "endlessly spiralling" interior monologue. Pinter, working upon a broader base, plays wordgames with all classes ofcharacter , amazingly tracing motives and meaning beneath the irrationality of idiom and jargon, even shaping his play by the patterning of natural speech, but finally moving uncomfortably close to Beckett's own anti-theatrical position. If language is the primary source of vitality in a play, perhaps we should consider excluding from the theatre some of the most recent work of these unholy twins. Happily, it is not. These summary remarks do no justice to Andrew Kenney's close arguments and helpful analyses. For his book is an important contribution to our understanding of modern drama. I wish only that his eye were as sharp as his ear. J.L. STYAN University of Pittsburgh BACK TO BECKETT, by Ruby Cohn. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973. xx & 274 pp. $12.50. The essential orientation of Professor Cohn's most recent book on the works of Samuel Beckett is implicit in its title. Cohn cites a number of reasons why this title was chosen but the most crucial reason is stated in her Foreword as follows: "I want in this book to get back to Beckett, to the words of the works, which penetrate the width and depth of human experience." More specifically, the author manifests some anxiety at the fact that "Beckett has become a domain for scholarly research, which learns more and more about less and less." Thus, this book represents a highly personal response to Beckett's artistic expression which attempts to avoid as much as possible interpretations based upon critical abstractions or learned allusions. In practical terms, the copious and precise annotation 396 BOOK REVIEWS of Professor Cohn's earlier book on Beckett is abandoned in deference to the critical assumptions of this book. Significantly, "the scholarly apparatus of footnotes and index" is characterized as "intimidating" and is "deliberately avoided." The immediate precedent for this critical posture might be found in Beckett's own work. Beckett indulged in literary or art criticism only reluctantly. When he did so the result was the antithesis of "academic" criticism and often contained within it several rhetorical flourishes undercutting the critical process itself. Typically, vast erudition was elicited in support of a radically antiintellectual position - a position which was subsequently enacted in Beckett's own art. Consequently, Cohn's suspicion of scholarship divorced from personal response, of critical abstraction divorced from feeling, and of language divorced from being has deep roots in her subject. Scholars who feel thwarted...