Introduction to "Historicising Beckett"

Abstract

The essays collected here constitute a selection of the papers delivered on the subject of Historicising at the annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures (IASIL), which was held at the National University of Ireland, Galway in July 2004. We are grateful to the organisers for allowing us to participate in a highly memorable conference, and we are also grateful for an opportunity to publish a selection of the proceedings here. The overwhelming response to the initial call for papers may be taken as one indication of a growing sense of unease among scholars regarding the consensus that Beckett was a profoundly ahistorical writer. All too often, Beckett is read as an artist from nowhere, one whose imagination functioned outside history, and there is evidence of an implicit consensus that Beckett scholars would do better to focus their efforts on his complex relationship with a European philosophical and/or literary tradition. The counter-claim made here is that Beckett's writings do not function outside history, although, as S.E. Gontarski indicated many years ago, they do incorporate an intent of undoing to make them appear as though they might. Gontarski shows how Beckett painstakingly excised social and cultural determinants from successive drafts of his dramatic works in order to achieve the austere semblance of deracinated aesthetic. seems that Beckett consistently devalued content in favour of form as he revised his work, and this has meant that the social content of Beckett's writings is often viewed as an entirely ancillary concern. It is the shape that matters, as Beckett observed many times to his various directors and interpreters, so it is reasonably claimed that the various deterritorialised readings of Beckett's texts are only honouring the terms of engagement set by Beckett himself.

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