Samuel Beckett and Pain ed. by Hori Tanaka, et al (review)

impossible position? Just by reading his sophisticated arguments about how circumstance alone separates the reader from the architects of the Holocaust, do we open the door to acquiescence? Or exoneration (Moyn, 128–30; Razinsky, 145)? How does fiction enable a different understanding of the past than history? Antoine Compagnon, ruing le piège littéraire, notes that the dense historical erudition of Les bienveillantes “taught me virtually nothing, yet I did not close the book” (114). More than half of these essays eschew what in war would be called a frontal attack and work instead from the novelists’ prior productions, or from significant affiliations that provide a revealing éclairage for their theaters of cruelty. Thus, parallel production comes to the fore in Marc Dambre’s analysis of Littell’s “ludic intertexuality” (170); or in Lynn Higgins’s use of Julien Duvivier’s film of Némirovsky’s David Golder to better define the melodramatic, noir elements of her representational strategies; or in Steven Ungar’s approach to the perpetrator-as-narrator problem via Littell’s Le sec et l’humide and Belgian fascist Léon Degrelle. Co-editors Watts and Golsan take on the important challenge of epic in Les bienveillantes with their considerations of Littell’s references to Greek tragedy and, unexpectedly, to the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs. The volume also contains an exchange of letters between Némirovsky, her husband Michel Epstein, and American publisher William Bradley about an English-language edition of one of her novels; and the first appearance in English of The Child Prodigy, a short story Némirovsky wrote at the age of eighteen, rich in its thematic coherence with the questions raised by her later fiction. These colossal works have been well served by the analytical rigor of the essays; for the ethical scruples consistently invoked therein, the editors and authors deserve our appreciation. Skidmore College (NY) John Anzalone Hori Tanaka, Mariko,Yoshiki Tajiri, and Michiko Tsushima, eds. Samuel Beckett and Pain. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. ISBN 978-90-420-3523-2. Pp. 244. $67.50. Recent years have seen a wealth of critical interest in the ways in which Beckett’s work engages subjectivity at its limits, with studies of, to name a few, Beckett and torture, the body, death, and trauma and testimony. This latest volume of essays seems to promise to join these works in reading Beckett’s exploration of the subject in various states of epistemological and corporeal distress. But what saves it from becoming yet another overview of critical territory that has become all too familiar is the delicacy and nuance with which the writers investigate their subject, and the diverse ways in which they surprisingly connect the works’expressions of pain to the very real presence of pain within Beckett’s life. Many of these essays productively engage biographical sources, including only recently available documents such as Beckett’s reading notebooks and letters, in order to show the centrality of pain in the writer’s life, avoiding the by-now exhausted critical gambit of simply offering an abstract or disengaged 220 FRENCH REVIEW 87.4 Reviews 221 analysis of whatever critical concern is willed to be operative in the work. The essays thus uniquely and surprisingly explore the varieties of Beckettian pain, inspired by this mutually interdependent relationship between the writer’s emotional and physical experiences of pain, loss, and suffering, and pain’s incidence in his characters. Beckett, the editors write in their introduction,“was compelled to write on pain, himself being in pain and sympathizing with the other people’s pain” (21). This theme is explored most fully in the first essay, Mark Nixon’s lucid and detailed account of how Beckett’s early aesthetics emerged from the biographical experiences of pain that led him to study the traditions of quietism, pessimism, and melancholia. In arguing that Beckett consistently “sought to find a cultural, artistic solution for a personal problem” (33), Nixon offers a fresh analysis of Beckett’s early development as a writer and establishes a thematic that will be taken up by many of the other writers in the volume, including excellent contributions by Graley Herren, Garin Dowd, Yoshiki Tajiri, and Jonathan Boulter...