Beckett before Beckett: Samuel Beckett’s Lectures on French Literature (review)

Brigitte Le Juez’s Beckett before Beckett (trans. Beckett avant la lettre) illuminates Samuel Beckett’s theories of modern French literature, particularly of Racine and Gide, at a pivotal moment in his development during his last lectures as a teacher and before he wrote his first novel. The book is a study and contextualization of a notebook from one of Beckett’s students, Rachel Burrows, during his lectureship at Trinity College Dublin from 1930 until 1931. In essence, Le Juez reconstructs Beckett’s lectures from Burrows’s notes and an interview with Burrows herself. Le Juez also uses Beckett’s own contemporary writings and his sources for those writings in her reconstructive effort.

With a brief introduction of the relevant biographical facts appended, the organization of Beckett before Beckett follows that of the course taught to Burrows, beginning with a discussion of the novel and ending with one of drama. Beckett’s chief question concerning the novel is “how to apprehend the real” without distorting “the incomprehensibility of the real” (30). To answer that question, Beckett compares Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, and Proust (with Balzac representing the least successful) before moving on to an extended discussion concerning the influence of Gide and Dostoevsky on Beckett himself. Citing in particular Lafcadio’s Adventures, The Counterfeiters, The Immoralist, and Gide’s eponymic essay on Dostoevsky, Beckett concludes that in Gide there is a “development from Nietzsche through Dostoevsky to Racine—from assertion of moi to renunciation of moi to independence of moi” (35).

In the section on drama, Beckett contrasts Corneille with Racine, asserting that unlike Corneille, who was “utterly artificial” and who “was distorting the real by his heroics, showing people as they were meant to be,” Racine “painted men as they were” (53). Beckett asserts that Racine’s use of “liminal consciousness” made him “extraordinarily modern” in “the framework of classicism” and allowed him to express the repressed passion without destroying “the integrity of the real”(53). Through Burrow’s notes, Le Juez explores Beckett’s lectures on Andromaque, Phédre, and Bérénice, observing how Beckett “draws a parallel between Gide and Racine” by demonstrating how the “dramatist uses the dialogue between the protagonist and their confidants to reveal the main characters’ divided selves. The confidants’ questions, exclamations and objections echo the misgivings in the minds of the protagonist, forcing them to confront these misgivings” (59–60).

Le Juez gives a candid portrait of a young, unsuccessful artist trying to explain his aesthetic theory before beginning a long and fruitful career. For those interested in Beckett as both a man and an author, Beckett before Beckett presents an intriguing personal and professional perspective through the eyes of one of his students. Le Juez skillfully broadens this perspective by contextualizing (and in some cases even correcting) these notes through the use of other contemporary sources. Even for those whose interests do not normally lie along Beckettsian lines, the content of the lectures themselves is of great value to any student of literature—the volume proves both engaging and enlightening.