From Godot to Mabrouk: Beckett on the Moroccan Stage

Sustaining Nothing: Untranslatable Material in Beckett's <i>Worstward Ho</i>

Reviewed by: Beckett after Beckett David Pattie S.E. Gontarski and Anthony Uhlmann, eds. Beckett after Beckett. Tallahassee: University of Florida Press, 2006. Pp. 227. $59.95 (Hb). 2006, the centenary of Beckett's birth, was a busy year. The regular stream of conferences and publications devoted to his work has swelled into a flood, and the amount of material generated will no doubt keep publishers, academics, and students amply occupied for a while yet. This outpouring, however, should take no one by surprise; Beckett has always generated more than the usual amount of commentary and criticism, with no sense that his work is in any way exhausted by it. In fact, Beckett criticism is approaching an interesting developmental point: the Beckett archive is being mined, his letters are beginning to appear, and, as S.E. Gontarski notes in the introduction, all of this activity serves to create a series of afterimages through which Beckett's work is being reassessed. The period after Beckett — the turn toward biographically informed criticism, the advent of new critical schools (eco-criticism and genetic criticism are represented here), and the continuing use of Beckett's texts in contemporary French critical thought — does not tend toward the production of a final summary, either of the work itself or of the work's implications. Rather, the afterimages are multiplying, and the trace of Beckett is spreading, through philosophy, through performance, through literature, and through art. In these circumstances, a collection concerned with the afterimages produced by Beckett's writing is welcome, and especially when the collection is (by and large) as successful as this one. In Gontarski's and Uhlmann's collection, we encounter a range of the traces that Beckett has left: the first being Beckett himself, in a letter written to George Duithuit a few days before the composition of the Three Dialogues. In it, we encounter the argument laid out in the Dialogues — about an art devoid of relation — presented with more hesitancy and self-deprecation; the letter, in other words, retraces the Dialogues. And, as such, it is a useful paradigm for a collection that attempts a number of such retracings, both of Beckett's work in general and of the fine details of particular pieces of writing. Herbert Blau, for example, notes Beckett's traces in the history of American conceptual art; this trace moves across the dividing lines between modernity and post-modernity and across the lines imposed by distinct art forms — a trace of mourning discernible [End Page 290] as a ground bass beneath the practice of modern art. Bruno Clement, in "What the Philosophers Do with Samuel Beckett," discerns the retracing of Beckett's work in the writings of Deleuze, Badiou, and Anzieu, arguing (to my mind convincingly) that Beckett's work is used by all three as raw material for discussions of the nature of subjectivity, which discussions are simultaneously closely reasoned and fundamentally incompatible with one another. Other contributors write of the traces in Beckett's own work. Stephen Barker makes a strong argument for the trace of Nietzsche's conception of time in Beckett's art, and John Pilling provocatively notes the relative absence of Fritz Mauther's thought in Beckett's work — thus neatly removing a trace which Beckett scholars have been hunting down for decades. C.J. Ackerley discusses what might be called the reversed trace of Max Nordau in the evolution of the related ideas of coenaesthesis and the "Not-I" in Beckett. Anthony Uhlmann contributes a closely argued chapter on the images that Beckett borrowed from philosophy — images which, Uhlmann argues, are as central to the evolution of the Beckettian aesthetic as the artistic images already noted by Knowlson and others. A third set of contributors deals with the complex matter of the development of the Beckettian trace. S.E. Gontarski addresses the emerging "grey canon" in Beckett's work: the material, ancillary to the artworks, that necessarily transforms our ideas of the art. In particular, he deals with the weight of information now available on Beckett the director and in doing so provides more evidence for those who regard Beckett not only as a significant playwright but as a significant...

Giving Sam a Second Life:Beckett's Plays in the Age of Convergent Media Sean McCarthy In 1984 JoAnne Akalaitis directed a production of Samuel Beckett's Endgame at the American Repertory Theater (ART) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Among her many directorial choices, Akalaitis set the play in a derelict subway tunnel with charred subway cars and included music by Philip Glass. Although it was not the first time that a director of one of Beckett's plays had taken liberties with the text, a very public debate developed around the Akalaitas production. Grove Press, Beckett's publishers, took legal action against the ART; the issue was settled out of court through the agreement of an insert into the program, part of which was written by Beckett himself: Any production of Endgame which ignores my stage directions is completely unacceptable to me. My play requires an empty room and two small windows. The American Repertory Theater production which dismisses my directions is a complete parody of the play as conceived by me. Anybody who cares for the work couldn't fail to be disgusted by this. (qtd. in Kalb 79) This surprisingly stern rebuke by the usually mild-mannered Beckett and the attendant legal tussle made the ART's production of Endgame famous. The incident sparked a vigorous debate in both the popular and academic presses about the issue of authorial control in general and Beckett's zealous guardianship over the production of his plays in particular. In 2008 a quick search on the World Wide Web finds thousands of links to Web sites and multimedia content relating to Beckett. These include biographical sites that contain abundant information about this prolific playwright, novelist, poet, and critic. Many sites are home to reproduced Beckett texts not sanctioned by the Beckett estate or his publishers, unofficial archival footage of famous productions of the stage, television, and radio plays, and engaging (if often bizarre) interpretations of many Beckett texts in a variety of media. Much of this work is by anonymous people unrelated [End Page 102] to the "Beckett industry," those publishers, scholars, biographers, theater companies, media corporations, and artists who contribute to the vast and growing body of art and scholarship inspired by Beckett's life and work. In fact, the number of amateur productions of Beckett on the Web suggests that audiences have left their darkened auditorium seats to produce their own Beckett plays, oblivious, perhaps, to the controversy and legal wranglings such productions would have caused only two decades ago. The coexistence of these Beckett performances online contributes to what I call Beckett "in the wild": performances of Beckett's works that almost always diverge from what he prescribed and which, by being freely available on the Internet, seem to have broken loose of any professional or legal legitimacy. What has happened to the life of Beckett's texts between the notorious Endgame production in 1984 and a simple Web search in 2008? Beckett's works continue to be popular and resonate with audiences. But the major difference between now and twenty-four years ago lies in the rapid development and popularity of online technologies. Using Beckett as a case study, this essay explores how current media practice is changing texts generally ascribed to traditional literary or theatrical genres. Beckett is an apposite choice in this regard, partly because his innovative use of technology and the apparently simple staging of his plays have made him a popular choice for online broadcast. The curious life of Beckett online includes not only a wealth of important archival material, but also a fascinating range of experimental performances of his plays—many of them amateur, and presumably lacking the imprimatur of the Beckett estate. Throughout, I turn to Henry Jenkins's theory of convergence to help contextualize this exploration of Beckett in the complex media culture of 2008. Ultimately, I look ahead to possible directions in the future of Beckett online, suggesting that virtual environments such as Second Life offer productive possibilities to engage with Beckett's texts in the twenty-first century. Before the advent of the Internet, a clear split existed between those who produced media and those who consumed it. Now, thanks...

Samuel Beckett as World Literature

Reviewed by: Beckett and Proust, and: Beckett's Critical Complicity: Carnival, Contestation, and Tradition, and: Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text Adele King Nicholas Zurbrugg . Beckett and Proust. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; Totowa: Barnes, 1988. 313 pp. £19.50. Sylvie Debevec Henning . Beckett's Critical Complicity: Carnival, Contestation, and Tradition. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1988. 228 pp. $19.00. Steven Connor . Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988. 222 pp. $34.95 cloth; pb. $16.95. Reviewing Beckett's recent Stirrings Still, a text of about 1,500 words, for the Times Literary Supplement, Alan Jenkins remarked: "For years, books about Samuel Beckett have been considerably longer . . . than books by him." Steven Connor, in defining the power relations between Beckett's texts and criticism of them, says that Beckettian discourse is a "discursive formation" in its own terms, with a high degree of productivity and influence. Each of the three books under review adds to this discourse, relating at least as much to other critics of Beckett and to various theorists as to the fiction and plays but succeeding most when closest to Beckett's own texts. Nicholas Zurbrugg, interested in the distinctions of modernist and postmodernist fiction, sets out to prove that Beckett in important ways misread Proust. This [End Page 812] has meant that critics have tended to misread Proust via Beckett and to misread Beckett's own work. Thus they have confounded the "confident, positive relativism of the Modernist novelist" and "the pessimistic, negative relativism of the Post-Modern novelist." A major part of Zurbrugg's book is devoted to a detailed examination of Beckett's Proust. He concludes that Beckett sees in Proust only what will confirm his own vision of the world. This analysis is supported by a number of observations of detail. Zurbrugg comments perceptively that Tante Léonie is the most Beckettian character in Á la recherche du temps perdu. He discovers echoes of Proust in Beckett's work, echoes which deliberately subvert any positive response. Marcel's white hawthorns, harbingers of an almost religious ecstasy, evoke a very different response in Molloy: "The white hawthorn stooped towards me, unfortunately I don't like the smell of hawthorn." By comparing Beckett's vision to Proust's, Zurbrugg is able to define what he terms Beckett's "lobotomized mysticism," a vacillation between boredom and suffering in which there is no enchantment. But in seeking to emphasize how Beckett differs from Proust, Zurbrugg underestimates Proust's own pessimism. Proustian moments of enchantment are essential, but they do not come from experience of sexual love, which is, as Beckett saw, primarily a preordained tragedy. The central thesis is that "Beckett's incomparable sensitivity to the negative and nihilistic dimensions of Á la recherche du temps perdu is consistently flawed by his inexplicable indifference to the positive dimensions of this novel." Zurbrugg quotes Beckett as saying, years after he wrote Proust, "Perhaps I overstated Proust's pessimism a little." The difference in tone between the critic and Beckett may suggest one of the problems with Zurbrugg's book. His writing is flawed by jargon, inflation, repetitions, and categorizing at every opportunity. He writes of "the non-habitual gestural discourse of exemplary non-artists" in Á la recherche du temps perdu. He discovers "four principal kinds of non-habitual awareness" in Dream of Fair to Middling Women. He tends to argue unduly with critics, suggesting, unfairly, that most critics of Proust have considered Marcel's grandmother to be among the damned and that few have recognized the limitations of Beckett's views of Proust. (He attributes to me a sentence that I paraphrased from the English translation of Á la recherche, to suggest that I have misinterpreted Saint-Loup's character. This is not my interpretation, but Marcel's!) Sylvie Debevec Henning finds echoes of Á la recherche particularly in the structure of Krapp's Last Tape, a text Zurbrugg does not study. These echoes contribute to her stated purpose, to show how the carnivalesque dimensions of Beckett's work, the dialogics, parody, satire, and "uproarious," affirm "cultural vigor and creativity" even in the midst of the portrayal of suffering and anguish. Her main method of substantiating her thesis is...

This article tries to envision and assess the feasibility of a critical multilingual edition of Beckett's works, against the background of both traditional editorial theory and new developments in the field. In the case of Beckett's theatrical work, he kept revising his texts in performance. German editorial practice in particular has offered several examples of dealing with this kind of variance, reflecting the author's multiple and changing intentions over time in a critical edition. The situation becomes more complex in Beckett's case due to the multilingual aspect of his work. One way to reflect the multiplicity of Beckett's texts would be to present them as both product and process, in the form of critical multilingual editions with revision narratives connected to, and informed by, the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project ( www.beckettarchive.org ). In this way, the various versions of Beckett's work are not reduced to a critical apparatus but exist alongside the critically edited twin texts, calling the readers’ attention to crucial points of textual variation, rather than smoothing them out.

Using Jean-François Lyotard's ideas from The Postmodern Condition as a starting point, this study examines the postmodern elements in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. The themes and structure of Beckett's work are consistent with Lyotard's rejection of big narratives and postmodern knowledge's decentralized, fragmented character. An embodiment of Lyotard's skepticism and celebration of the "incredulity towards metanarratives" is waiting for Godot, with its circular narrative, enigmatic characters, and existential reflections. This research shows how Beckett's portrayal of waiting, uncertainty, and the quest for meaning resounds with the postmodern state by looking at the play's artistic choices and thematic aspects. The character's words and deeds or lack thereof reflect the play's postmodernist alignment with meaning instability and the deconstruction of conventional storytelling. Viewed through this prism, Lyotard's Waiting for Godot becomes the prototypical postmodern work, summarising his theoretical claims.

376Comparative Drama Katherine H. Burkman, ed. Myth and Ritual in the Plays of Samuel Beckett. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1987. Pp. 169. $24.50. James Acheson and Kateryna Arthur, eds. Beckett's Later Fiction and Drama: Texts for Company. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987. Pp. 206. $27.50. S. E. Gontarski, ed. On Beckett: Essays and Criticism. New York: Grove Press, 1986. Pp. 418. $12.95 (paper). Though I have no statistics to offer, my guess is that the Beckett industry is quickly becoming one of the most productive in the academic community. And on the occasion of the Nobel Prize winner's eightieth birthday, an abundance of books appeared. Three of these—all collections of essays by diverse hands and all engaging and insightful—prove that Beckett, like Didi and Gogo, is "inexhaustible." The most focused of the collections is Katherine H. Burkman's Myth and Ritual in the Plays of Samuel Beckett. Burkman has arranged the ten original pieces in three groupings: "Journeying," "Storytelling," and "Myth and Démythification," explaining each category in a brief introductory overview. The essays find common ground in their recognition of Beckett's insistent use of myth and ritual in the plays and novels. But their claims and their approaches are varied. Lois More Overbeck's essay on Endgame, for example, offers a strategy for analyzing Beckett's characters ' façon de vivre. Judith A. Roof's "A Blink in the Mirror" is an inquiry into two models that Beckett's myths often reflect: Oedipus and Narcissus. Susan Maughlin explores Victor Turner's concept of liminality in relation to Endgame. And Stephen Watt, in a theoretically poststructuralist piece, discusses Beckett's use of the green world, setting up a myth/ ritual binarism. One of the strongest essays in the collection is Susan D. Brienza's "Perilous Journeys on Beckett's Stages." Brienza traces the quest motif in Beckett's work, suggesting ways in which the writer retains the framework of myth while reshaping physical journeys into "psychological searches, metaphysical struggles, and linguistic voyages." Other contributors include Martha Fehsenfeld and Phyllis Carey, both on Happy Days, Rosette C. Lamont on Beckett's metaphysical clowns, Mary A. Doll on "Rites of Story: The Old Man at Play," and Claudia Clausius on Waiting for Godot. Though uneven in several respects—some essays are more ambitious than others, some more theoretical, some more gracefully written—the volume is a stimulating contribution to an important and complex aspect of Beckett's writing. Beckett's Later Fiction and Drama: Texts for Company, edited by James Acheson and Kateryna Arthur, is an anthology of thirteen original essays by a number of major figures in Beckett scholarship: Enoch Brater, Colin Duckworth, Martin Esslin, S. E. Gontarski, Rubin Rabinovitz, Katharine Worth, and others. The collection's emphasis on the more recent theater and prose pieces (which the Burkman collection neglects) makes it an especially attractive volume and a valuable resource for studying "minimal" Beckett. The quality of the essays in this collection is consistently high, the insights consistently illuminating. Reviews377 Essays on the prose include Rubin Rabinovitz, "The Self Contained: Beckett's Fiction in the 1960's," Brian Finney, "Still to Worstward Ho: Beckett's Prose Fiction Since The Lost Ones," Nicholas Zurbrugg, "/// Seen III Said and the Sense of an Ending," and Enoch Brater, "Voyelles, Cromlechs and the Special (W) rites of Worstward Ho." Each of these writers establishes connections between and among these later short pieces, noting intertextuality with Beckett's early work and with the work of other writers—notably, in Brater's essay, Rimbaud. Together, these four essays survey the prose writing from All Strange Away (1979) to Worstward Ho (1983), with special attention to /// Seen III Said and Worstward Ho. Essays on the late plays include Katharine Worth, "Past Into Future: Krapp's Last Tape to Breath," Charles R. Lyons, "Beckett's Fundamental Theatre: The Plays from Not 1 to What Where," and James Acheson, "The Shape of Ideas: That Time and Footfalls." Here, too, writers move freely through the Beckett canon, establishing connections. Collectively, the essays cover the plays from Krapp's Last Tape (1958) to What Where (1983), with Acheson concentrating on...

Painted Word examines Samuel Beckett's relationship with the visual arts, in an effort to shed new light on the author's work and on his thinking on aesthetics. Lois Oppenheim argues that Beckett was a profoundly visual artist whose work reflects a preoccupation with the visual as a paradigm of creativity. She presents the three principal forms taken by Samuel Beckett's dialogue with art, and more precisely, painting: his critical writing on art, the function of art in his narrative and theatrical writing, and his indirect collaborations with painters.The volume's starting point is the current debate over Beckett's place with regard to modernism and postmodernism. Contextualizing his practice of art with his thinking on art, Oppenheim resituates the debate in conjunction with philosopher Merleau-Ponty's writings on painting and reveals the unifying force of all Beckett's work that resides in a play of visbility. Beckett's thinking on art had everything to do with his aims as a creative writer. Oppenheim shows that the classic Beckettian themes--language (its expressivity or lack thereof), identity (its, at best, tenuous link to a fragmented self), and the subject-object dichotomy--are all modeled on the sensory perspective of the eye. And that it is the verbal figuration of reality as vision that constitutes, whatever the genre, the Beckettian drama.The volume includes several reproductions of artists' renderings of Beckett's texts and works by Giacometti and Bram Van Velde, two of which were owned by Broadly interdisciplinary, Painted Word will appeal to those interested in aesthetics and the philosophy of art as well in Beckett's work.Lois Oppenheim is Professor of French and Chair, Department of French, German, and Russian, Montclair State University. She is President of The Samuel Beckett Society, and author of many books including Directing Beckett.

Two of Samuel Beckett's shorter dramatic works, Film and Krapp's Last Tape, investigate the confrontation between man and his doubles, between a text and its doubles.1 Each work involves a dialogic encounter on some level with these provocative supplements. The two works develop different aspects of this confrontation. Film shows man attempting to flee his double, but failing. In Krapp's Last Tape, he attempts to recover his doubles, but also fails. In either case, the protagonist is trying to achieve an integral, totalized personality, by eliminating the disturbing supplements, or by integrating them. The failure of both tactics points to problems in the traditional logic of identity and difference. Self-identity appears, in Beckett's works, as a futilely sought-after chimera. Although man's doubles, his past selves as well as the multiple aspects of his present character, are all similar they are not identical. Some differences always remain that cannot be integrated into an all-encompassing whole. The doubles, in other words, belong together in a supplementary, rather than complementary, relationship.2 We shall also see that Beckett's texts themselves

Godot ke Intezar Mein (Hindi), Godor Pratikshay (Bengali), Eppo Varuvaru (Tamil), Kalpo Ke Kalpana Mari Parvari Chhe (Gujarati), Edin Ahibo Teu (Assamese), Su Yee (Kashmiri): these are just some of the translations and adaptations of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot into Indian languages. They reveal how Beckett's chef d'oeuvre has reached every corner of the country, from Tamil Nadu in the South, to Kashmir in the North, Assam in the East, and Gujarat in the West. Just as Honoré de Balzac's fictitious Godeau returns prosperously from 'Les Indes' in Le Faiseur (1848), Beckett's Godot gains from the remarkable dissemination through a multilingual, multicultural, social, and political space of post-independence India. This thesis, divided into three parts, is a comparative study of the relation between Samuel Beckett's works and Indian prose fiction, drama, and cinema, from the moment when Beckett's oeuvre was first introduced in India. Engaging with recent debates on the concept of world literature, it assesses three phases that are pertinent to the three parts and the circulation of Beckett's works through India: 1) the topical-planetary phase: Beckett's influence on Anglo Indian novelists, starting with Salman Rushdie; 2) the world-making phase: the circulation of Beckett's works amongst Indian playwrights, based on themes, writing techniques and style; and 3) the canonical phase: Beckett's pervasive presence rather than direct influence in Indian mainstream and experimental cinema. Put together, these three parts form a three-phase evolution, and a conceptual framework for world literature. In exploring Beckett's influence, circulation, and pervasive presence in Indian literature, alongside adaptations and re-creations of Beckettian motifs, characters, and stylistic techniques, this thesis not only re-conceives of Beckett's place in world literature today, but it also presents a process by which his works achieve canonicity. Starting with the works of Rushdie, the thesis charters new territories where Beckett's works have found a place, while the comparative approach draws attention to the heterogeneous and complex nature of modern Indian literature.

Despite the costly efforts and best intentions of both English-language publishers of Samuel Beckett's work and the labours of textual scholars during and just after Beckett's centenary year, Beckett's texts have improved only incrementally and inconsistently in these new centenary and post-centenary editions. This article traces some of the editions of Beckett's work generated by the centenary celebrations, the promises made for them, and the incomplete fulfilment of those promises. In particular, the article traces some of the issues surrounding the Faber editions of 2009–10, especially the author's volume of Krapp's Last Tape and other Short Plays, and appends to this critique the introduction or “Preface” as written before in-house editors at Faber truncated it. In the centenary and post-centenary years, not only have major publishing opportunities been lost, but current efforts may have retarded future corrections. It may be some time before other such efforts to correct Beckett's texts in uniform editions are launched.

The Solution as Problem: Beckett's Waiting for Godot* ROLF BREUER • WAITING FOR GODOT (written in 1948, first published in 1952)1 is Beckett's most popular work. Most popular not only among th~ wider audience of theatergoers but also among professional critics - as the amount of scholarly attention shows. Besides sociological, Marxist, existentialist , and even biographical interpretations, there are, above all, religious readings where the famous Mr. Godot who never shows up in the play is understood to be a deus absconditus. Taking this line of interpretation as a starting point, the following is an analysis of the structure of Waiting for Godot in light of concepts developed by Bertrand Russell, Alfred Tarski, and Ludwig Wittgenstein (the distinction of logical levels) which were recently applied by a group of psychiatrists at Palo Alto to explain certain anomalies and paradoxes in schizophrenic as well as everyday communication. Furthermore, I shall refer to Beckett's other works as they help us to better understand the problems which arise in Godot.2 In rather striking contrast to the basic idea of Aristotelian drama (drama meaning "action" in Greek), the main plot in Waiting for Godot stresses the inert waiting of the two characters, Vladimir and Estragon; and, indeed , Beckett's first title for the play was simply En attendant, "waiting." In terms of physical space, this waiting is the attitude of "stay, wait and *Mr. Beckett has read this article and has given his permission to add a line of dedication, "To Samuel Beckett for his seventieth birthday." R.B. 225 226 ROLF BREUER see"; on the other hand, at a spiritual level, it is "expectation." Therefore , the two tramps know that no change in location will solve their problems: VLADIMIR. We've nothing more to do here. ESTRAGON. Nor anywhere else. (p. 134) Similarly, in Texts for Nothing (1950) one finds: "Where would I go, if I could go ... 1"3 Thus, the attitude of waiting becomes an inevitable lifestyle and an end in itselfas is explicitly stated by the narrator in the novel Malone Dies (1948, written after Godot): ... he who has waited long enough will wait forever. And there comes the hour when nothing more can happen and nobody more can come and all is ended but the waiting that knows itself in vain.4 In Malone Dies and in the other novels of the trilogy (Molloy and The Unnamable) it becomes evident that any quest (or waiting) is eo ipso doomed to failure - not only because the goal is unattainable but even more so because of the reflexive structure of the quest. Stasis as the principle of Waiting for Godot is especially obvious at the ends of both acts where the tramps~ words contradict the stage directions : ESTRAGON. Well, shall we go? VLADIMIR. Yes, let's go. They do not move. (p. 138) These lines are repeated, only with the speakers exchanged, at the end of the second act. (p. 232) This inability to move is not the sign of a superior peace of mind but rather an indication of resignation and weakness while the tramps retain their yearnings and illusions. Gunter Anders correctly characterizes the behavior of the two by saying that their guiding principle seems to be '''We are waiting, thus we must have something to wait for."'5 For, although we have noticed that their waiting is largely devoid of content, as an attitude it nevertheless has clear religious overtones and is similar to a vaguely defined Christian expectation of salvation. In other words, many of the Christian interpretations are to an extent valid and certainly touch upon a central point of the play.6 On the surface Beckett seems to resemble Camus' religiously tinged existentialism, but from the thematic similarities of the play to his earlier novel Watt (1943-45) it is apparent that Beckett is much more rigorous and ascetic than the author of, for example, La Peste. In Watt, Beckett uses the paradoxical method of having Mr. Knott ("naught") appear in order to show what does not exist, that is, the purpose is to show that the problem of the novel is a question which, first of all, has to be posed...

Reviewed by: Beckett, Lacan, and the Mathematical Writing of the Real by Arka Chattopadhyay Fernanda Negrete Beckett, Lacan, and the Mathematical Writing of the Real. Arka Chattopadhyay. New York: Bloomsbury, 2019. Pp. 224. $135.00 (cloth); $39.95 (paper); $35.95 (eBook). How might the writings of Samuel Beckett and Jacques Lacan respond to each other? Arka Chattopadhyay pursues this question in a cogent project that foregrounds mathematics as a common terrain for these two contemporary authors, whose work developed in separate fields despite various relevant points of intersection. Beckett, Lacan, and the Mathematical Writing of the Real begins by acknowledging the missed encounters between Beckett and Lacan, given their shared context in postwar Paris among avant-garde writers, their awareness of each other, and even the coincidence of their birthday. The book demonstrates a psychoanalytic sensibility in remarking on the missed encounters, and above all in allowing them to promptly place the investigation on the path of the textual unconscious in terms of the mathematical letter. The author offers an attentive ear to only seemingly passing comments the writers in question made about each other: Beckett mentions that Lacan's "later work tends to become unreadable" (4), and Lacan in his 1970 text "Lituraterre" invokes Beckett's "dustbins" (5), while discussing the materiality of the letter and the litter of the unconscious. Chattopadhyay follows these traces to reveal the uniqueness of what he calls mathematical writing, which is crucial to both Beckett and Lacan's creativity. Through the term mathematical writing, Chattopadhyay brings into focus the two authors' use of concepts from mathematics as well as a formal dimension of writing that is concerned with a kind of transmission that leaves behind the interest in sharing meaning. Chattopadhyay reminds us that as long as writing is understood as a technology subordinated to speech and meaning, the relation between literature and psychoanalysis remains unidirectional. In this relation, psychoanalysis is an interpretive device applied to literature. There are many critical works that establish such relations between the fields, through applied psychoanalysis that attempts to interpret—that is to say, to explain away—literary texts, or even more often, their authors. But it is fair to say that Beckett's texts refuse this sort of treatment. Attempts at enforcing it can only yield a partial grasp of what Beckett's texts put to work. While his writing stands beyond Oedipal concerns, its modes and gestures remain highly relevant to analytic thinking, especially the kind that also ventures out beyond Oedipus, as it did in Lacan's teaching. Chattopadhyay's book introduces the Lacanian register of the Real in order to approach writing from a perspective suitable to Beckett's experiments. From the perspective of the Real, Chattopadhyay demonstrates that Beckett's texts in fact contribute to better understanding the [End Page 806] relevance of the Real. The latter operates outside realist ideals and norms in literature, especially. The Real also places the psychoanalytic clinic outside normative and adaptive goals; this aspect, however, is only discussed to the extent that Lacan presents it as a logical process that seeks the end of analysis with the construction of a sinthome and the analysand's becoming analyst. In an exposition of existing commentaries on the role of mathematics in Beckett's work, Chattopadhyay declares his interest in adding to this investigation psychoanalysis, whose function he describes "as a bridge of Real inscription between mathematics and literature" (17). In his foreword to the book, Anthony Ullman instead sees the mathematical as the original bridging element between Beckett and Lacan (ix). In fact, mathematics, psychoanalysis, and literature are each set forth in chapter one to operate as bridges that enable a discussion between the two other terms, in a triad the author extracts from multiple texts by Beckett and Lacan throughout the book's other chapters. Contributing to this ambitious bridging or knotting of fields are the admirable breadth and depth with which both figures' work is embraced in the book. Its engagement with Beckett offers to Lacanian readers useful examples of the logical implications of the French psychoanalyst's related concepts of the letter, sinthome, jouissance, lalangue, the One, and above all the Real, or of...

Reviewed by: Beckett Translating/Translating Beckett S. E. Gontarski Alan Warren Friedman, Charles Rossman, and Dina Sherzer , eds. Beckett Translating/Translating Beckett. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1987. 245 pp. $24.95. Beckett Translating/Translating Beckett promises much: a "new perspective" that will emphasize "three significant aspects of Beckett's art that have received insufficient consideration," those being "his bilinguality," his exploration of "several verbal, kinetic, and visual media," and his influence on "many other artists." As the final category suggests, the word "translation" is given very wide berth; almost any aspect of what we have traditionally called "creativity" is here called "translation," including the rendering of "not only the metaphysical but also the political world of the twentieth century into powerful tragic images." The editors announce "a new phase in Beckett scholarship," but the proclamation seems hyperbolic; the Introduction has more the ring of a publisher's proposal than an assessment of contents. And yet with twenty-two wide-ranging essays organized in five sometimes awkward categories, the volume makes good on many of its claims. Part One, "Translations French/English, English/French," aside from developing the editors' mania for dichotomies, does call attention to (even as it fails to, indeed cannot, resolve) what remains one of the most vexing problems in Beckett studies, the relation of Beckett's texts in the language of their composition to their author-translated counterparts. To call them separate texts and be done with it not only doubles the canon but begs the question. Brian T. Fitch convincingly argues that the translated text, in this case Companie, "provide[s] a kind of interpretation of Company." For Fitch the two versions remain "interdependent," and so even the best of arguments brings us back full circle. To the central question, "Which version [the French or the English, or the text in its language of composition or the translation] is the 'real' or the 'better' one?" Majorie Perloff can only note, "Obviously bom and neither." But the pleas of critics in Part One for Beckett scholars to confront the multilingual aspects of the Beckett canon are largely unheeded, even for the remainder of the volume. Linda Ben-Zvi admits, for instance, "Also, what I am saying about the sound structures in How it is will alter in the French translation Comment c'est." The point here is less the blunder (the French, of course, is not a translation) than the fact that most critics don't treat the bilingual nature of Beckett's work, even in volumes at least titularly devoted to that subject. Part Two, called "Conceptual Transmutations," is the fuzziest of the categories. It includes some fine essays, including Rosette Lamont's epiphany at the Auschwitz death camp, "that Samuel Beckett is one of the great Holocaust writers of our time." In an act of legerdemain, however, the section also includes Richard Keller Simon's attack on all those critics who have seen Beckett as a comic writer (most of whom are represented in this volume, unrepentant). In the following essay, writing on Beckett and Duchamp, Jessica Prinz (wisely) ignores (or perhaps is unaware of) Simon's argument as she notes that "humor is an essential component of their [Beckett's and Duchamp's] work." Certainly, many of the critics in the volume would have welcomed the opportunity to respond to Simon directly. Scholarly disagreements are healthy, but here they resemble an "Exquisite Corpse," as critics add to a whole without knowing what others have contributed. [End Page 722] Part Three, "Genre Transformations," seems to be a more distinct category than those preceding, because most writers discuss what H. Porter Abbott calls working "against genre," Ben-Zvi's linguistic discussion of "manipulation with phonemes" excepted: against autobiography (Abbott), against the pastoral (Smith), against the whole of drama (Zeifman), against the whole of fiction (Moorjani), and against all genres (Hayman). Part Four, "Transpositions for Stage and Screen," includes a survey of Beckett's work for television (Bishop), a detailed history of adaptations of Beckett's work by Mabou Mines (Cohn), and a look at the American playwright most influenced by Beckett, Sam Shepard (Brienza). By the fifth and final "Part" the reader may still be...