Beckett and Aesthetics by Daneil Albright (review)

Reviews 155 some of the most dynamic and significant critical approaches. Feminist scholarship , for example, garners a single mention, when Pavis supports Elizabeth Grosz's idea of "embodied subjectivity," although he quickly turns the discussion back to Michael Chekhov's principles of psychological gesture (240). I realize that most of us writing in the English language are seldom, if at all, well read in non-English language theory and criticism, and it might be argued that, under such circumstances, my criticisms here are unfair. Yet, if Analyzing Peiformance is to engage the target readership for its North American edition , it must, surely, show some interest in the scholarship those readers have produced. It is not good enough simply to gloss over insularity in the introduction ; it is, instead, way past time that we - scholars and publishers alike insist on the conversations and engagements that would make the current make-up of Pavis' text impossible. Analyzing Petformance is an interesting book, but, in the end, a lost opportunity. DANElL ALBRIGHT. Beckett and Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. 179, iIIustraled. $60 (Hb). Reviewed by Carl Lavery, De Mont/orr University, Leicester Important scholarship generally manifesls ilself in two ways. Either it shifts the terrain of the discipline by developing new insights, or it painslakingly pieces logether what everyone simply purports to know. Daniel Albright's recent book Beckett and Aesthetics belongs to the second category. In this slim, well-argued volume, Albright shows how Beckett's famous comment about failure in "Three Dialogues" (1949) is not simply a philosophical idea, something existential, but on the contrary, is an aesthetic principle that he developed and honed throughout his career. According 10 Albright, Beckett's perverse art "of muleness, incompelence and non-feasance of transmission" was born from an initial, naiVe hope "that writing mighl provide psychic aulhenticily" (2). On realising Ihe impossibililY of his utopian quest, Beckett, Albright claims, sel off in Ihe opposite direclion: toward debunking the scam of representalion, revealing the lie of art, and purposefully botching communication. Paradoxically, this approach allowed Beckett to play what Same, in a different context, calls the "game of loser wins" (248). For, as Albright notes, "if it is true that art can do little or nothing , then to provide little or nothing is a form of facing the truth" (2). One of the features of Albright's impressive book is his attempt to relate Beckett's aeslhetic of failure to other artistic movements and media. In his informative introduction, for instance, he highlights the influence of surrealism on Beckett's work. For Albright, Beckett's surrealism lies not in his sensi- REVIEWS bility - he preferred psychotic writing to neurotic wrltmg and dead imagination to convulsive beauty - but in his technique: his attempt to fracture and transgress conventional notions of artistic form. Albright illustrates this by showing how Beckett's fiction, with its breakdown of grammar and syntax and obsession with infinity and infirmity, has much in common with the petrified figures in Max Ernst's painting Europe after the Rain (1940-42) and the transparent mannequins in Giorgio de Chirico's Archaeologists (1927). Where the introduction concentrates on the relation between Beckett's fiction and surrealist painting, chapter one compares his dramatic practice in the four major plays - EleutMria (J947), Waiting for Godot (J948), Endgame (1957), and Happy Days (J96J) - to that of other playwrights, such as Brecht, Yeats, Ibsen, and most crucially, Kafka. Like Kafka, Beckett despaired of realism and psychology and desired, instead, a theatre that would "hover" in some impossible space between being and non-being. Beckett succeeded in producing a hovering stage, Albright maintains, by creating a "self-cancelling drama," in which "nobody in particular manages to extricate itself from any possible story, in which a play simultaneously takes place and reveals itself as a nothing thing" (32). Albright describes how Beckett manufactured his impossible theatre by parodying existing theatrical forms and radically deconstructing conventional notions of character, plot, action, and meaning. In Albright's persuasive exegesis, Beckett is an anti-Ibsen, an anti-Brecht, and an anti-Yeats. He empties theatre of its substance and presence and manages to produce what Albright charmingly calls "a theatre of...