Beckett and the Modern Novel

Abstract

John Bolin's succinctly titled book traces Samuel Beckett's development as a novelist from 1930 to 1950 through an attention to his formative literary precursors. Bolin argues that Beckett scholarship has tended to overemphasize the philosophical underpinnings of his work and not given sufficient consideration to his evolving ‘theory and practice of the novel’ (p. 6). In an effort to remedy this lack, Bolin studies Beckett's novels in chronological order, from Dream of Fair to Middling Women to Malone Dies (with a brief nod to The Unnamable in the Conclusion), and anchors his textual readings in associations he draws between Beckett's narrative techniques and those of prior writers. Bolin's critical approach is generated by the idea that understanding ‘the source of [a] technique’ (p. 51) — the act of correctly identifying literary influences — enables readers to historicize, contextualize, and thus interpret properly the aims of Beckett's aesthetic project. Bolin elaborates fascinating connections that demonstrate the breadth of his archival research: he shows, for example, how Beckett's lectures on Gide in 1930, which emphasize (according to students' notes) Gide's anti-realist stance, resistance to narrative closure, experiments with mise-en-abyme structures, and interest in self-reflexivity, profoundly shaped Beckett's own narrative practices and his writing of Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Murphy, Watt, and the Trilogy. Bolin's two chapters on Watt, heavily reliant on a close engagement with Beckett's notebooks held in the Harry Ransom Center archive at the University of Texas at Austin, study the evolution of the novel and its ‘new narrative mode of questioning and reasoning’ (p. 86) that anticipates Beckett's later texts. Attending to Beckett's correspondence, Bolin identifies other literary influences such as Sade, Céline, and Sartre — his chapter on La Nausée as a source text for Molloy in their similar critique of the diary form as ‘a master-narrative of self-discovery and salvation’ (p. 138) is particularly sharp — but Bolin's primary concern throughout his study is more with Gide as a literary precursor than with any other modern writer. Given its unstated but important resonances with Harold Bloom's notion of ‘an anxiety of influence’, Bolin's study could have done more to theorize the ways in which literary influence itself complicates and unsettles an author's relationship with his or her textual production. Did Beckett, following Bloom's general argument, ever misread or wilfully distort his predecessors as a means of carving out a space for his own aesthetic creativity? Such an inquiry into the transparency of literary legacy, and its consequent elusive nature as a conceptual and methodological frame, would help to deepen the novel insights and compelling discoveries that Bolin articulates throughout Beckett and the Modern Novel.