Surreal Beckett: Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, and Surrealism by Alan Warren Friedman (review)

Alan Warren Friedman states the goal of his book from the outset: “Surreal Beckett: Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, and Surrealism situates Beckett’s writings first within the context of James Joyce and then of Surrealism and the Surrealists, perhaps the two greatest aesthetic influences on his life and work” (xv). In his preface, Friedman explains the critical context of his project, calling for a more extensive study of the way Surrealism affected Beckett’s work. Joyce’s impact on Beckett’s writing has long been the subject of critical examination.¹ By prioritizing that connection, however, many of the Surreal influences on either author have been overlooked because of Joyce’s resistance to identification as an avant-garde writer (33).

Friedman successfully counters previous analyses of Beckett’s work that claimed Surrealism was a secondary area.² While scholars such as Benjamin Keatinge have observed that Beckett exists “‘on the fringes of Surrealism,’”³ Friedman demonstrates how central Surrealist imagery and ideals are to Beckett’s work (xvii). Surreal Beckett seeks to explore these previously overlooked commonalities. Friedman begins by giving a history of Surrealism, then analyzing the connections between Joyce, Beckett, and Surrealism before exploring how Beckett incorporates Surrealist images and ideas of the unconscious and narrative throughout his oeuvre. Friedman locates consonances between Beckett’s texts and myriad Surrealist figures, paying special attention to the work of André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, and René Magritte. Ultimately, Friedman provides readers with an intensely detailed study of the Surrealist influences in Beckett’s writing, while also explaining how they work alongside Joycean similarities.

In the second chapter, “Joycean Connections,” Friedman claims, “Despite Joyce’s insistence to the contrary, a case can be made for a mutual influence between his work and Surrealism, especially in the ‘Circe’ episode of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake’s night vision and dream emphasis, linguistic subversion, and imagistic juxtapositions” (34). Friedman provides a detailed explanation of the myriad ways, both large and small, Joyce’s texts engage Surrealist imagery. He extends these connections to Beckett as well, noting not just how Beckett’s writing reflects Joycean imagery but also the often-coincidental ways in which Beckett and Joyce’s careers aligned. Perhaps the most prominent example of Surrealist influence identified by Friedman is each author’s interest in identity construction and deconstruction. Comparing narrators from Joyce’s major texts with those of Murphy, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Krapp’s Last Tape, and others, Friedman explicates the developing interest in “discontinuity of identity” or characters whose identities are developed nonlinearly (42).⁴ He ties this interest to contemporaneous Surrealist trends and developments in psychoanalysis. Friedman’s analysis shows how, despite his claims to the contrary, Joyce’s work asked many of the same questions as the Surrealists did.

Friedman’s strongest example of this is seen in Beckett and Joyce’s relationship to language itself. While each author engages issues of the possibilities (and limitations) of linguistic play in a unique way, as Friedman points out, “[d]espite his antipathy toward language, Beckett shared Joyce’s etymological as well as his entomological interest” (49). These twinned involvements in origins drove the authors in different aesthetic directions, however. As Joyce offers readers a proliferation of words in the Wake, Beckett’s later work becomes more restrained. While the former developed meaning through an additive process of layering, Beckett stripped his texts more and more following his famous epiphany in 1945. Friedman describes Beckett’s move away from Joycean influence at the conclusion of the chapter:

But Beckett’s epiphany led him to acknowledge what he subsequently considered “my own folly” (in his earlier writing), and to address and incorporate into his writing what he had previously repressed or denied: “Only then did I begin to write the things I feel,” recognizing that, in contrast to Joyce, “my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge, and in...