Abstract
The introduction outlines key features in Samuel Beckett’s critical writing. Tim Lawrence discusses some of the main trends in Beckett studies, noting the emphasis placed on archival material as well as the lack of attention paid to other areas in the “grey canon”—especially Beckett’s critical writing—and to the unique status of representation and the figural in these texts. This introduction also traces the importance of unknowability to the Beckettian, noting how Joyce’s influence on Beckett’s style hinges on the aesthetic value of ignorance. Lawrence thus contends that questions of philosophical and aesthetic influence can best be understood by studying the figural and visual texture of Beckett’s critical writing.
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- 1.
Maurice Blanchot, “Où maintenant? Qui maintenant?” in Le Livre à venir, Collection Folio Essais (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 286–295; trans. Charlotte Mandell as “Where Now? Who Now?” in The Book to Come (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 210–217; Hugh Kenner, “The Cartesian Centaur,” in Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study (London: John Calder, 1962), 117–132.
- 2.
The most significant study on Beckett to draw from Merleau-Ponty is Ulrika Maude, Beckett, Technology and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Following Maude, on Merleau-Ponty and Beckett’s post-war and late fiction, see Amanda Dennis, “Refiguring the Wordscape: Merleau-Ponty, Beckett and the Body” (PhD Diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2011); and drawing on Merleau-Ponty in relation to Beckett’s theatre, see Trish McTighe, The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett’s Drama (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
- 3.
Gilles Deleuze, “L’Épuisé,” in Quad et Trio du fantôme, … que nuages …, Nacht und Träume, suivi de L’Épuisé par Gilles Deleuze, by Beckett , trans. Edith Fournier (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1992), 57–106; trans. Anthony Uhlmann as “The Exhausted,” SubStance 24, no. 3 (1995): 3–28. Deleuze’s theories are extensively discussed in: Anthony Uhlmann, Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Mary Bryden, ed., Beckett’s Proust/Deleuze’s Proust (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011); Colin Gardner, Beckett, Deleuze and the Televisual Event: Peephole Art (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012); S. E. Wilmer and Audronė Žukauskaitė, eds., Beckett and Deleuze (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); S. E. Gontarski, Creative Involution: Bergson, Beckett, Deleuze (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015).
- 4.
S.E. Gontarski, “Greying the Canon: Beckett and Performance,” in Beckett after Beckett, ed. Gontarski and Anthony Uhlmann (Gainseville: University of Florida Press, 2006), 141–157.
- 5.
Lois Oppenheim, The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett’s Dialogue with Art (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 85–94.
- 6.
Detailed in Mark Nixon and David Tucker, “Towards a Scholarly Edition of Beckett’s Critical Writing,” Journal of Beckett Studies 24, no. 1 (2015): 49–56.
- 7.
Often seen to begin with the publication of Knowlson’s biography, Damned to Fame, in 1996, although Beckett’s centenary year in 2006 and the growth of the Beckett International Foundation archive at Reading University offered further catalysts to Beckettians’ own archive fever. See the commentary on these issues in Nicholas Johnson, “A Theatre of the Unword: Censorship, Hegemony and Samuel Beckett,” in Ireland, Memory and Performing the Historical Imagination, ed. Christopher Collins and Mary P. Caulfield (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 39–40; S.E. Wilmer, “Negotiating the Archival Turn in Beckett Studies,” Deleuze Studies 6, no. 4 (2012): 585–588.
- 8.
Kevin J. H. Dettmar, “The Joyce that Beckett Built,” James Joyce Quarterly 35, no. 4–36, no. 1 (Summer-Autumn 1998): 606.
- 9.
To the consternation of Beckett and Alfred Péron, Joyce replaced their translation with one credited to another translation group led by Philippe Soupault. See Megan Quigley, “Justice for the ‘Illstarred Punster’: Samuel Beckett and Alfred Péron’s Revisions of ‘Anna Lyvia Pluratself’,” James Joyce Quarterly 41, no. 3 (2004): 469–487; Sinéad Mooney, A Tongue Not Mine: Beckett and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 42–47; Sam Slote, “The Joyce Circle,” in Samuel Beckett in Context, ed. Anthony Uhlmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 149–159.
- 10.
Beckett’s interview with Gruen is usually misdated to 1969, when Gruen’s article was published in Vogue. See Erik Tonning, Samuel Beckett’s Abstract Drama: Works for Stage and Screen 1962–1985 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 59n6.
- 11.
Israel Shenker, “An Interview with Beckett,” in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, ed. Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (London: Routledge, 1979), 148.
- 12.
James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), 352.
- 13.
Lawrence E. Harvey, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 435.
- 14.
Patrick Bowles, “On Beckett in the Early 1950s,” in Beckett Remembering/Remembering Beckett, ed. James and Elizabeth Knowlson (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 109.
- 15.
Shenker, “An Interview with Beckett,” 148.
- 16.
Richard Beckman. Joyce’s Rare View: The Nature of Things in Finnegans Wake (Florida: University Press of Florida, 2007), 64.
- 17.
Ibid., 65.
- 18.
Sophie Thomas, Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, Spectacle (New York: Routledge, 2008), 6.
- 19.
Ibid., 7.
- 20.
Ibid., 8.
- 21.
Ewan James Jones, Coleridge and the Philosophy of Poetic Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 43.
- 22.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Limbo,” in The Major Works, ed. H.J. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 132, lines 16–17.
- 23.
Jones, Coleridge and the Philosophy of Poetic Form, 142.
- 24.
Carla Taban, “Samuel Beckett: du discours descriptif, fictif et critique sur la peinture à la contiguïté du discursif et du pictural,” Word and Image 27, no. 2 (2011), 220–233.
- 25.
Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesy; my emphasis. Citation slightly adapted from the modernised edition in Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 217.
- 26.
Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “representation,” n.1, def. 9b. Hereafter abbreviated in-text as OED.
- 27.
Lois Gordon, The World of Samuel Beckett (Yale: Yale University Press, 1996); especially chapter two, “Paris, 1928,” 32–52, and chapter seven, “France,” 140–167; Shane Weller, “Post World-War Two Paris,” in Uhlmann, Samuel Beckett in Context, 160–172.
- 28.
Blanchot employs the term when discussing L’Innommable in his review essay, “Où maintenant? Qui maintenant?” See Leslie Hill, who makes special use of the term ‘neutre,’ formulated as “in-difference,” in his influential study Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
- 29.
Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, rev. ed. (London: Penguin, 2004), 82. On the “long shadow” cast by Schopenhauer on Beckett’s representation of women, see Shane Weller, Beckett, Literature, and the Ethics of Alterity (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 167–169.
- 30.
See Susan Brienza, “Clods, whores and bitches: misogyny in Beckett’s early fiction,” in Women in Beckett: Performance and Critical Perspectives, ed. Linda Ben-Zvi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 91–105. Even John Pilling’s sympathetic reading of Beckett’s More Pricks than Kicks, the collection of stories culled from Dream of Fair to Middling Women, admits that women in the stories “seem to become victims […] only by staying put.” Pilling, Samuel Beckett’s “More Pricks Than Kicks”: In a Strait of Two Wills (London and New York: Continuum, 2011), 41.
- 31.
Mary Bryden points to the importance of binary separations between male and female characteristics in Beckett’s presentation of women, notably drawing from Aristotle’s contrast between features of the “Limited” and “Unlimited” in the Metaphysics, and Hélène Cixous’s critical revision of such lists in “Sorties.” See Bryden, Women in Samuel Beckett’s Prose and Drama (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993), 3–10.
- 32.
See Rina Kim, Women and Ireland as Beckett’s Lost Others (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Kim draws on these limitations and ambivalences in Beckett’s œuvre to argue for a Kleinian reading that connects Beckett’s gender and national politics around the themes of absence and lack.
- 33.
Uhlmann, Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image, 141.
- 34.
Ibid., 48.
- 35.
Beckett is alluding here to the “Scylla and Charibdis” episode of Ulysses, in which Buck Mulligan parodies Stephen Dedalus’s theory of Hamlet by conceiving of an absurd play, “Everyman His own Wife or A Honeymoon in the Hand (a national immorality in three orgasms).” James Joyce, Ulysses: The 1922 Text, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 208.
- 36.
John Gruen, “Samuel Beckett talks about Beckett,” Vogue 154 (December 1969): 210.
- 37.
See John Pilling, A Samuel Beckett Chronology (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 83.
- 38.
Wassily Kandinsky, “Abstract and Concrete Art,” in Complete Writings on Art, ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (Boston, MA: Da Capo, 1994), 840.
- 39.
Kandinsky’s influence over the post-war art-scene in Paris was formidable. Several important exhibitions of his work were held between 1946 and 1951 in Paris, while his widow Nina Kandinsky established a contemporary art prize in his name in 1946. Kandinsky was a figure of importance for expatriate artists resident in Paris, and despite becoming a naturalised French citizen in 1939, the École de Paris controversially excluded his work from showings on the basis that he was not a sufficiently ‘French’ artist. Kandinsky’s posthumous presence in Paris is detailed in Natalie Adamson, Painting, Politics and the Struggle for the École de Paris (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 82–92.
- 40.
The term “poetics of ignorance,” which has come into fairly widespread use in Beckett studies, was coined by Dirk Van Hulle, “Samuel Beckett’s Faust Notes,” in “Notes Divers Holo: Catalogues of Beckett’s Reading Notes and Other Manuscripts at Trinity College Dublin, with Supporting Essays,” ed. Matthijs Engelberts, Everett Frost and Jane Maxwell, special issue, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 16 (2006): 283–298. Bataille’s theory of unknowing is pervasive in his theoretical writing. For detailed readings of the concept in relation to Beckett, see: Jean-Michel Rabaté, “Bataille , Beckett, Blanchot: From the Impossible to the Unknowing,” Journal of Beckett Studies 21 (2012): 56–63; and Adrienne Janus, “Laughter and the Limits of Identity: Joyce, Beckett and the Philosophical Anthropology of Laughter,” Études irlandaises 38, no. 1 (2013): 173–186.
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Lawrence, T. (2018). Introduction. In: Samuel Beckett's Critical Aesthetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75399-7_1
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