Reading and Interpreting Variants inCome and Go,Va-et-vientandKommen und Gehen

Abstract

This paper focuses on textual variants in Come and Go, Va-et-vient and Kommen und Gehen and considers these variants as thresholds (Genette, 1997) into these works. This paper aims to show how Beckett's self-translating process, which was prolonged and complicated in the case of his plays when he directed them himself, produces a number of possible textual confusions, but also how these complications constitute insight into the Beckettian text. Indeed variants and rewritings point to moments in the writing and rewriting process when Beckett met ‘resistant vitalities’ mentioned by George Steiner in After Babel (1975). To illustrate this, I study Beckett's first ‘dramaticule’, Come and Go, by examining its pre-texts, the French translation, and Beckett's production notebooks for Kommen und Gehen. In these texts, I explore the motifs of death and ocular anxiety, as studied by Freud in his famous paper on ‘The Uncanny.’ I show how the Freudian uncanny actually reveals the parodic archaism of Beckett's drama, as a parallel is drawn between the structure of Beckett's play and Greek tragedy. Beckett's sometimes ‘messy’ rewritings in Come and Go, Va-et-vient and Kommen und Gehen served the performing intuitive perception in us of death, an issue explored here through the trope of femininity. Furthermore, comparing Beckett's Come and Go and Va-et-vient makes it easier to see Beckett progressing towards what Deleuze called a ‘theatre of metamorphoses and permutations’ in Difference and Repetition – a monograph published in France the very year Come and Go was first produced (1966).