Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution Gregory Byala Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution. By Pascale Casanova , Gregory Elliott. , London: Verso, 2006; pp. 119. $23.95 cloth. Writing in response to the existential-humanist tradition in Beckett scholarship, Pascale Casanova argues that Beckett's real achievement is not his affirmation of the human spirit, but his development of a purely abstract literature that refers to nothing outside of its own compositional practice: Far from being frozen in the bombast consubstantial with the rhetoric of Being, Beckett more than anyone else was concerned with aesthetic modernity. From the Second World War onwards, he deliberately situated himself in relation to the whole literary and pictorial avant-garde he mixed with in Paris—and definitely not Existentialism or the Theatre of the Absurd, whose presuppositions were alien to him. [13] Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution was published originally in France in 1997 under the title, Beckett l'abstracteur. Anatomie d'une révolution littéraire. The translation promotes Casanova's subtitle to title, thereby stressing the historicist side of her argument over the formalist. This reconfiguration helps to explain Terry Eagleton's introduction, which praises Casanova's attempt to situate Beckett in what Eagleton calls "a certain material history—one which is largely the history of his native Ireland" (4). For Eagleton, everything in Beckett, including his concern for the body, his flirtation with bicycles, and his obsession with tramps, can be traced to Irish sources. The only exception (and it is a very large one) is Beckett's rationalism, which Eagleton admits has no precursor in Irish literature or philosophy. By contrast, Casanova's Beckett is more predictably Irish. Her reading of him makes no reference to Maturin, Edmund Burke, or Flann O'Brien (as Eagleton's does). Instead, Casanova discovers a rather commonplace Beckett, one who is struggling both to avoid the antiquarianism of the Celtic twilight (symbolized most potently by Yeats) and to move beyond, or beneath, the literary escape route provided by Joyce. Casanova's Beckett is therefore hardly Irish at all; he is distinctly cosmopolitan in his interests, as the following quotation on the relationship between Joyce and Beckett makes clear: Dante was therefore their first intellectual bond, the first indication of a common endeavour to escape from what they felt was the fate of Irish confinement, a sign of cosmopolitan inclinations, the mark of an identical refusal of a purely nationalist aesthetic, which they alone could detect in one another when they met in Paris. [46] The appearance of this study in English is motivated by the recent critical desire to see Beckett as either a distinctly Irish writer or, at the very least, as "the Irish European." The dialogue that takes place between Eagleton's introduction and Casanova's text is therefore fascinating because it demonstrates the degree to which both Irish studies and the concept of Irish modernism have evolved in the past decade. Undoubtedly, the highpoint of Casanova's study is her reading of Worstward Ho, a text that has been underrepresented in the critical literature to date and that she sees as the "magisterial conclusion to the whole oeuvre" (16). Casanova is at her best when she remains close to Beckett's language, allowing her formidable strengths as a reader to emerge in concert with her sense of Beckett as an author who is attempting to bring into literature the kind of abstraction available in modern painting, music, and sculpture: "in Worstward Ho there are no longer any concessions to the ultimate conventions of literary realism, no longer things or places" (21). As Casanova describes it, the novel is "a pure object of language, which is totally autonomous since it refers to nothing but itself" (26). Absent from her reading, however, is any mention of the lines from Shakespeare's King Lear that help to explain the futility of Beckett's attempts at both abstraction and conclusion: "the worst is not, / So long as we can say, 'This is the worst'" (4.1.26–27). Even in the moments when he is struggling hardest to efface the possibility of narrative and arrive at a literature of the...