Beckett's Eighteenth Century by Frederik N. Smith (review)

Abstract

180 Reviews justification for making the connection at all is particularly good: Beckett and Niet? zsche can be seen as characters in one another's texts. Nietzsche forall his assertiveness writes in a void (protesting loudly: 'Why I Write Such Good Books', for instance) and cannot (ha!) avoid it. Beckett writes in the void but cannot avoid the plenum. Nietzsche is a Beckettian babbler, Beckett an empty Superman. We are not there yet, but this book lets us know how far we've got. Universite de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour Lance Butler Beckett's Eighteenth Century. By Frederik N. Smith. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. 2002. x + 2i9pp. ?40. ISBN 0-333-92539-4. Yeats wrote in the preface to Words upon the Window Pane, 'Swift haunts me; he is always just around the next corner.' He haunted Beckett also. Swift (who derided 'modernism' in the name ofthe 'ancients') when read through Beckett (and in Beckett) becomes, paradoxically, a canonical voice of (post)modernism. His work is proleptic of the ontological dilemma of our own post-enlightened and fractured culture in which the pursuit of authority is lost in the mazy dance of intertextuality,the ironic interplay of signifier and signified, leaving, ultimately, 'a tale told by an idiot [. . .] signifying nothing.' (Which allusion may suggest that Swift's (post)modernism was itself ancient.) Gulliver's insanity, and Swift's, possess iconic status. They hold the mirror up, not to Nature, but to the human condition: 'Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err.' Swift is not a lone signifier(as the citation fromPope indicates). He is representative of an eighteenth-century canon which involves the self-reflexive ironic mode of the novelists Fielding and Sterne (and, perhaps, Defoe), and even the Christian humanism of Johnson, whose diseased life and sense of the vanity of human wishes made him a Beckettian protagonist in embryo: 'Life protracted is protracted woe.' The Dunciad, ultimately, is the most obvious (post)modernist eighteenth-century text: 'nothing but forms becoming and crumbling into the fragments of a new becoming' (as Beckett wrote of Murphy's mind) or, as Winnie said, 'One loses one's classics. (Pause.) Oh not all. (Pause.y (pp. 67, 156). This is Frederik Smith's argument, summarized here perhaps more provocatively than he might wish. It is developed in three successive stages: through the analysis of what Beckett read of the eighteenth-century canon; through his (Joycean) use of textual intercalation; and, ultimately, and most revealingly, through the practice of what the eighteenth century called 'imitation': that is, the absorption and re? creation of both the method and the substance of earlier writers (by which Beckett freed himself from 'the anxiety of influence' of Joyce). It is a dialogic process. We understand Beckett better this way, but we are compelled also to reinterpret the eighteenth century. It is an argument with which readers of T. S. Eliot are familiar. Smith has a superb memory and the ability, hence, to recall textual phrases across the dark backward and abysm of time. He has, also, the ability to perceive analogies and the skill to develop their significations. Mrs Rooney's meditation on a 'hinny', for instance, is changed utterly when brought into relation to Shandean meditation: '"With an ass I can commune forever"' (pp. 64-65). But, of course, once spin the historical tuner in this way and where, or why, should one stop? Sterne's 'ass' is an allusion to The Dunciad (as Smith will know) and Mrs Rooney's 'hinny' relates to the story of Christ's entry into Jerusalem. These images fresh images beget. So clever, perceptive, and provocative are the textual and thematic relations that, at times, one cannot tell where the eighteenth century ends and Beckett begins. From what text does this come: 'the pulse fluttered, stopped, and went on, throbbed, stopped again, moved, stopped. Shall I go on? No.'? (Answer: p. 101.) MLR, 99.1, 2004 181 Ultimately, this close textual study raises major general questions. If Smith's ana? lysis carries conviction, then current attempts to displace the canon are (to use a Swiftean word) 'mad'. The canon is historically there 'like...