Beckett and the Modern Novel by John Bolin (review)

Reviews 207 la lecture du livre de Blanchet-Douspis, il sera difficile de tenir Yourcenar pour une écrivaine purement apolitique qui ne se distingue que par l’excellence de son style et son goût pour les recherches historiques. L’auteure des Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951) et de L’œuvre au noir (1968) a suivi de près les débats politiques de son époque et a conservé tout au long de sa carrière des orientations foncièrement conservatrices, qu’elle a toutefois peu communiquées publiquement. Blanchet-Douspis a réalisé un travail de recherche impressionnant par son exhaustivité et sa précision. À noter uniquement que, même si ce livre est surtout destiné aux spécialistes, un aperçu biographique aurait été utile. Western Washington University Edward Ousselin Bolin, John. Beckett and the Modern Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013. ISBN 978-1-107-02984-2. Pp. 265. $100. Working across various literary forms as he did, Samuel Beckett, among modern writers, was notably conscious of the generic specificity of his works, and oftentimes suspicious of the perhaps insurmountable problems posed by the transposition or adaptation of his works across different media or discourses. Hesitant to have prose pieces, or even radio plays, adapted for the stage, he was also guarded about the critical lenses through which his works might be interpreted. Indeed, in an oft-quoted line taken from a 1961 interview, which serves as an epigraph to Bolin’s wonderful and welcome study, Beckett remarks: “I wouldn’t have had any reason to write my novels if I could have expressed their subject in philosophical terms” (1). And it is this thoughtful and sustained regard for Beckett’s own stress on maintaining his works’ literary status that makes Beckett and the Modern Novel such a vital new work in Beckett studies, and one of the finest monographs on Beckett’s work to appear in years. The dominant tendency in Beckett criticism, as Bolin begins by noting, is to read his novels and plays alongside philosophical thinkers ranging from Descartes to Derrida. But as Beckett suggests in the quoted interview, and as Bolin consistently proves in his readings, there is a specifically novelistic set of concerns through which Beckett was working in composing his early works. Reading these novels distinctively as novels, Bolin argues that Beckett “became increasingly preoccupied with staging the relation that underpins all novels: the fluctuating current of feeling between the voice and the story it tells”(4). The novels are thus explored as presentations of their narrators’“selfconscious responses to the problem of representation”(8), leading to inevitably failed acts of narration. In reading Beckett’s novels as explorations of the difficulties and even impossibilities of representing a reality that refuses to be organized into novelistic form, Bolin finds Beckett’s closest elective affinity among modern novelists to be André Gide, whose “approach to the novel as a kind of auto-critique which undermines its own foundations” (14) was actually more influential on Beckett’s own novelistic practice than the more commonly considered Proust and Joyce. And the great originality and importance of Bolin’s critical framework is largely found in his rigorous and careful use of notes from the lectures Beckett gave on Gide and the modern novel in 1930, as he demonstrates how instrumental Beckett’s readings of Gide (and key antecedents and inheritors such as Dostoevsky and Sartre) were on his own developing novelistic practice. Bolin’s study then offers compelling readings of each of Beckett’s novels from Dream of Fair to Middling Women through the breakthrough of the Three Novels, showing in every chapter just how much was learned from Gide’s ironic art of failure. This study fills a major gap in current Beckett studies, and it will be of great interest to any reader interested in Beckett’s place in the history of novelistic form. I hope that it proves influential in forging exciting new directions in scholarship on Beckett. Towson University (MD) Jacob Hovind Boschetti, Anna. Ismes: du réalisme au postmodernisme. Paris: CNRS, 2014. ISBN 978-2-271-07438-6. Pp. 352. 25 a. When we think about the history of art and...