Impotence and Making in Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy—Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable—and How It Is by Joanne Shaw (review)

Bellay and Ronsard, and Katherine Maynard relates satire to the theme of sickness in Ronsard’s Discours des misères de ce temps. The fifth and final section, “La satire militante au temps des guerres civiles,” has four contributions: CharlesAntoine Chamay and Bernd Renner on the Satyres chrestiennes de la cuisine papale, Guy Poirier on satire of Henri III and his mignons, Tom Conley on religious images and early map-making in France, and Martial Martin, who sees a newly emerging concept of satire between De la vertu du Catholicon d’Espagne and the Satyre ménippée. I hope this unforgivably brief summary has at least indicated the breadth of subject matter in this volume, and the many different definitions of satire involved here. Any seiziémiste will find plentiful stimulating material for discussion—and, of course, refutation—in this volume. Vanderbilt University (TN) Barbara C. Bowen SHAW, JOANNE. Impotence and Making in Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy—Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable—and How It Is. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010. ISBN 97890 -420-2973-6. Pp. 200. 40 a. The title of Joanne Shaw’s new study promises to unravel the knot of Beckett’s aesthetic of the “unword,” or of “failing better.” Arguing that impotence and making comprise a unified concept that forms the fundamental thematic of Beckett’s major novels, Shaw sets out to delineate how Beckett and his narrators engage with making and its opposite as elements in a dialectical relationship. The study promises to trace Beckett’s conception of making, while warning that making for Beckett “can never be isolated from not-making” (7). To move beyond this impasse, however, proves to be no easy task, and Shaw’s five densely argued chapters do not easily lead her reader out of this paradoxical position. The first two chapters analyze, respectively, bodies and words in Beckett’s trilogy, while the next two explore more closely the dialectical relationship between impotency and making that governs the Beckettian creation of words and bodies. In the last chapter, Shaw unites her various strands and offers a close reading of how “words and life [...] are bound together” (123) in How It Is, finding there the most explicit portrait of Beckett’s “cyclical” (160) pattern of making and “unmaking.” In Shaw’s analysis, Beckett’s narrators impossibly produce, out of their own persistent impotency, not only texts, but bodies, both their own and those of their narrated characters. Central to Shaw’s argument is her thesis that words and bodies, like making and impotency, are in an essentially interdependent relationship with one another. This is not to say simply that words create characters (as they certainly do in any fiction), or that the subject is always already enmeshed in language, an idea which has been elegantly and thoroughly analyzed by dozens of Beckett’s best critics from the past three decades. Instead, Shaw goes one step further and explores “the idea that, through an impregnation , words fertilize Beckett’s narrators to produce the foetus that will develop into their bodily offspring” (15). Thus, despite the fact that Shaw finds Beckett’s world to be one seemingly “without reproduction” (27), she can conclude her first chapter on “trilogy bodies” by claiming that “it is through his thought that the Unnamable creates, in a biological way, a bodily other” (47). On the question of how thought, or any fictional text for that matter, is to perform creation “in a biological way,” Shaw does not clearly elaborate. Reviews 761 Shaw posits that Beckett, in a “quasi-deconstructive move,” “seeks to contradict , undermine and complicate any simple binaristic opposition of making and impotence” (8–9), and she situates Beckett as a thinker of Derridean différance avant la lettre. Structured according to the same logic, her study follows a sometimes bewildering back-and-forth movement, analyzing tropes of fecundity, fertility , and performativity alongside, and in supposed connection with, images of decay, scatology, and failure. This pattern leads to such puzzling statements as the claim that in Beckett, “words (whether written or spoken) are both impotent and yet able to create bodies and texts” (16). Shaw’s study is not without its highpoints ; some of her...