Centennial Beckett: The Gray Canon and the Fusion of Horizons

Abstract

Centennial Beckett:The Gray Canon and the Fusion of Horizons Ulrika Maude Beckett after Beckett. S. E. Gontarski and Anthony Uhlmann , eds. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006. pp. ix + 227. $59.95 (cloth). “Notes diverse holo”: Catalogues of Beckett’s Reading Notes and Other Manuscripts at Trinity College Dublin, with Supporting Essays. Matthijs Engelberts and Everett Frost, with Jane Maxwell . Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006. pp. 391. $104.00 (cloth). Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body: The Organs and Senses in Modernism. Yoshiki Tajiri . Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. pp. ix + 200. $65.00 (cloth). Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image. Anthony Uhlmann . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. pp. viii + 191. $85.00 (cloth). Zone of Evaporation: Samuel Beckett’s Disjunctions. Paul Stewart . Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006. pp. 211. $55.00 (cloth). Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency. Andrew Gibson . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. pp. xiii + 322. $95.00 (cloth). 2006, the centenary of Beckett's birth, saw at least two dozen Beckett conferences, symposia, and colloquia organized in various parts of the globe, including Tallahassee, Reading, Dublin, Buenos Aires, London, [End Page 179] Paris, Prague, and Tokyo. What characterized these gatherings was the strength, vigor, and variety of new approaches to Beckett's work, also reflected in the sheer number of monographs and collections of essays on Beckett published in the centenary and its wake. If early approaches to Beckett's work might best be characterized as humanist-existentialist, and if the second wave of critical work on the author could broadly be described as poststructuralist, this third wave of Beckett criticism is more liberated from critical orthodoxies, and can broadly speaking be divided into two schools that also at times productively overlap: empirical criticism which relies heavily on biography and the vast number of manuscripts, notebooks, and letters Beckett wrote, and an imaginative "fusion of horizons," to quote Beckett's French critic, Bruno Clement, consisting of readings produced by critics and philosophers "who have known how to see in the oeuvres . . . that which was appropriate to them" (Clement in Beckett after Beckett, 131). Clement's examples, cited in his essay, "What the Philosophers Do with Samuel Beckett," are French and include three major thinkers, namely, Didier Anzieu, Gilles Deleuze, and Alain Badiou, all of whom offer oddly compelling and vastly different, if not incompatible, readings of Beckett's work. This characterization of the third wave of French Beckett criticism applies equally to critical approaches to Beckett's work in the English-speaking world and beyond. The publication, in 1996, of James Knowlson's authorized biography, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, has had a considerable impact on Beckett criticism, in providing scholars with an informed understanding of Beckett's formative reading, interest in art, working habits, and preoccupations.1 The wealth of archival material, whether in the form of correspondence, notebooks, or manuscript drafts, referenced in Knowlson's biography, together with the archival material made available to critics in recent years, has itself triggered a rise in what could be labeled a new empiricism as well as the prominence of genetic criticism in Beckett studies. Beckett after Beckett is a collection of fourteen essays and a letter Beckett wrote to Georges Duthuit in March 1949, preceding the famous Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, first published in transition in 1949, signed by Beckett and Duthuit.2 The publication of Beckett's letter to Duthuit, which sheds light on his thinking about aesthetics, is proof of the growing importance of what one of the coeditors of the volume, S. E. Gontarski, refers to as the "grey canon" (143). In his essay, "Greying the Canon: Beckett and Performance," Gontarski demonstrates Beckett's contradictory relation to his own work in his resistance to exegesis and his belittling of the role of author as authority, while simultaneously maintaining a puzzlingly strict control over even the smallest details of the various productions of his plays. In 1954, for instance, Beckett wrote to his American publisher, Barney Rosset, that he had "had a highly unsatisfactory interview with SIR Ralph Richardson who wanted the low-down on Pozzo, his home address and curriculum vitae," which clearly annoyed the author...

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