Impotence and Making in Samuel Beckett's Trilogy 'Molloy, Malone Dies' and 'The Unnamable' and 'How It Is' by Joanne Shaw, and: Say It: The Performative Voice in the Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett by Sarah West (review)

Joanne Shaw ponders the body in Beckett; Sarah West, the voice. Shaw shows how Beckett's words become spectrally fleshy; West, how bodies are textualized. Shaw reveals how words conjure up space; West, how Beckett's spaces stage voices. Shaw reads the prose; West, the plays. It is as though the pseudo-couple Shaw-West had decided to divide up the spoils between them. Both monographs share virtues: a generosity towards other Beckett scholars (the authors could almost be said to provide a survey of Beckett scholarship), and tried, tested, and plausible lines of research (West's performative voice, Shaw's male mother). Reading both volumes reveals just how strange the psychology of the Beckettian brain is, creativity being the symptom of a death-entranced longing for the womb created by a myth of the foetus 'born' prematurely in amniotic space (Shaw), or being the product of a belief in a voice coming at the brain literally from without (West). If these two theses are put together, we are very close to writing as scripted by a body at bay in Mary Magdalene Mercyseat.

Shaw tracks the contradictions operating in the post-war prose; the radical ways in which the voices style themselves as impotent at the same time as emitting spurts of creative energy that generate fictions of male mothers giving birth to text as to fleshy creatures beyond control. She is alive to the psychoanalytic undertow here, and gives a very sensitive account of other Beckettians working in this field: Didier Anzieu, Phil Baker, Angela Moorjani, and Leslie Hill. Her book complements their sense of Beckett's post-Wilfred Bion trajectory, and she develops the logic of Bion's container-contained model of maternal fashioning into an elegant succession of chapters mapping the womb enclosures across the prose. Some of Shaw's arguments lack ethical sensitivity: for instance, the idea that the torture scenes in How It Is generate life forms is stated, but not the appalling implications were this to be true. Equally, the occasional allusion to Holocaust or Cold War nuclear contexts is too fleeting to have any real impact. But there are also real discoveries to be made here, as in her use of Deirdre Bair's 1978 biography of the author to prove Beckett's interest in Melanie Klein and rematriation; her sophisticated tracing of the Promethean theme; her demonstration of the importance of Otto Rank's The Trauma of Birth (English translation, 1929); and the relevance of stories from the Lancet, as in the case of vagitus uterinus reported in 1957. Shaw manages both to examine closely the tropes incarnated in the prose, and to contextualize them within a story about Beckett's womb-tomb quests. This is a remarkably useful psychoanalytic study of Beckett's prose as creative/decreative act.

West's monograph spends too long introducing its theme, and there is a somewhat predictable study of Krapp's Last Tape, but once the author is firmly engaged with her major texts — the stage, radio, and TV plays written between 1959 and 1980, namely, Embers to Ohio Impromptu — the attention is detailed and her findings substantial, lively, and febrile. Like Shaw, she is tracking a difficult snark, in her case the extra-bodily voice in Beckett's ghost plays, the dictatorial (compositional) voice as by turns an insinuating, bullying, prescriptive, play-annihilating storyteller, or babble from depths beyond the ego. West's assurance with these difficult texts is admirable, in particular the care with which she unpacks the formal constraints and multiplicity of voice, the sensitivity to contradictions in the formal schema that give tiny freedoms to the subject...