Book Review: Interpreting Narrative in the Novels of Samuel Beckett

Abstract

By Jonathan Boulter. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. ISBN 0-8130-2106-5. Pp. 158. $55.00. To justify the offering of his book, Jonathan Boulter describes the Beckett academic community as caught between two extremes of novels. first method allegorical an approach that leans obtuse texts against some philosophical or literary structure exterior them and attempts explain what the texts are saying. second a poststructural emphasis on pure textuality, the endless play of the subject, and aporia of Boulter situates his own approach between these two methods as a balance between extremes of textuality and extremes of allegory (4). Drawing on Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutics of as a dialogue, Boulter acknowledges a disjunction between Gadamer's claim that meaning can exist only within the structures of language and the problem that language consistently falls back on itself, referring (Boulter claims) only its own failure mean (2). He also assumes as seminal his approach Paul Ricoeur's theory of appropriation, which describes a reader's interpreting his own selfhood through his understanding of a text. This hermeneutics also problematized by the aporetic nature of texts (5-6). invocation of Gadamer and Ricoeur, theorists not ordinarily linked with Beckett, prepares us for Boulter's premise that the of Beckett a the texts, which to place his or her against (or within) the already in place in the (3). This responsibility obligatory or because it requires one some hermeneutical reading of a text (7). This obliged, ethical specular--that is, he engaged in a dilemma that mirrors that of a Beckett character or voice, who likewise engaged in linguistic struggle. has no choice but make sense of all discursive acts in the texts because, in a very real sense, the [discursive] acts of the character become the acts of the reader (10-11). Close attention Boulter's language at this point reveals, however, that he not claiming that a text necessarily meaningful but rather that, for the hermeneutical process he describing operate, the text must remain open meaning. He insisting that his emphasis on the necessity of a reader's interpretive encounter with works, with the selections for this study being Watt (1959), Mercier and Camier (1970), Malone Dies (1965), Unnamable (1965), How It Is (1964), and a conclusion focused on Endgame (1958), Company (1980), Ill Seen Ill Said (1981), and Worstward Ho (1983). Boulter's underlying claim that prose works are about hermeneutics; they are about the of language. Beckett's primary concern in his novels Boulter states, is the question of interpretation (2). The novels, in short, are about the philosophical-hermeneutical grounds of understanding, a theme that other critics have missed and that he now addressing (4). Thus, we will not proceed read Boulter's book learn what the scenes, events, and characters portray as literature. Instead, we will be instructed in how the joins the Beckettian character in absolute proximity as both explore hermeneutical positions. Boulter's first chapter appropriately an analysis of Watt, first work that has as a central concern the struggle with language and the essential linguistic nature of experience (17). key word for grasping the import of this analysis parody. Earlier allegorical readings of the novel find Watt's heroic struggles uncover the mysteries of Mr. Knott and his estate represent the quest discover the metaphysical truth about the human situation. Thrown (as in Martin Heidegger) into the inevitability of this quest, Watt ends not only in bafflement and distress but also in rational and linguistic bankruptcy: he can no longer join letters into words into sentences that make sense. …