Abstract
This chapter considers Beckett’s 1930 Trinity College lecture ‘Le Concentrisme’ as a peculiarly modernist engagement with key traditions, works, and topoi of the literary hoax. It aims to historicize diverse strands of hoax writing in order to identify more precisely their distinct influences on ‘Le Concentrisme’ specifically, and on Beckett’s modernist poetics more broadly. The significance of these hoax traditions is their interweaving of key Beckettian concerns with the archive, authorial prestige, canonical authority, and literary afterlife. Thus, the genealogy of the hoax provides Beckett with a site for exploring anew the spectral structure of the archive, the mise en abyme of the self, and the modernist poetics of posthumity. In its attention to these themes, ‘Le Concentrisme’ performs a modernist twist on the classic hoax topos of the falsified posthumous memoir and its proliferating archive, undoing its ostensibly satirical ends through a comic poetics of failure and radical self-negation.
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Notes
- 1.
The exact date of the event is unclear, but on 14 November 1930 Beckett wrote to Thomas MacGreevy: ‘I read a paper to M.L.S. on a non[-]existent French poet—Jean du Chas—and wrote his poetry myself and that amused me for a couple of days’ (LSB I 55).
- 2.
As Pilling notes, ‘There is as yet no complete translation of the lecture published with the agreement of the Estate of Samuel Beckett, which holds all the appropriate copyrights’, although short excerpts have been translated by Pilling and published in the November 2011 issue of Modernism/modernity (2011a: 881). With some small tweaks, the English renderings used in this essay are from Michael Zeleny’s excellent, unofficial online translation (2006). I should also like to thank David Conlon and Ruben Borg for their generous advice and feedback on an early draft of this chapter.
- 3.
While a full overview of the recent ‘fakelit’ critical turn to historicize and theorize the literary hoax is beyond the scope of this chapter, my reading of Beckett’s hoax aesthetics takes place within the context of a broader critical conversation which includes, among others, monographs by Ian Haywood (1986, 1987), Anthony Grafton (1990), Susan Stewart (1994), Paul Baines (1999), K. K. Ruthven (2001), and Nick Groom (2002).
- 4.
For explications of their shared learned (and unlearned) wit, grotesque and excremental humour, misogyny, general temperamental affinity, and the ways in which Beckett would return to his Swiftian debts and inheritances throughout his career see Mercier (1962: 74–77, 188); Kenner (1962: 89); Fletcher (1962: 81–117); Tindall (1964: 36–37); Smith (1974; 2002: 27–46); Ackerley (2008: 60–67); Pilling (2011b: 238–239).
- 5.
Cohn notes that while a more standard translation of the Chasian motto might be ‘go be bored elsewhere’, Beckett personally suggested ‘Feck off’ to her as better capturing the intended spirit (2001: 22).
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Fagan, P. (2018). Samuel Beckett’s ‘Le Concentrisme’ and the Modernist Literary Hoax. In: Beloborodova, O., Van Hulle, D., Verhulst, P. (eds) Beckett and Modernism. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70374-9_11
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