Samuel Beckett by Andrew K. Kennedy, and: Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text by Steven Connor

Abstract

REVIEWS Andrew K. Kennedy. Samuel Beckett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pp. xiv + 175. $34.50. Steven Connor. Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988. Pp. ? + 222. $34.95. With his recent passing at the age of 83, the literary career of Samuel Beckett has now attained the historical closure so often denied to the characters of his novels and plays. "What remains" (a Beckettian echo) is our attempt to understand this now-fully-claimed place, to situate historically a literary career that spanned seven decades and to map its internal lines of relationship. Two books that appeared in the year and a half before the author's death suggest that this critical retrospective is already underway and that the largely consistent literary portrait that unified Beckett studies during its first thirty years is in the process of being replaced by divergent historical and aesthetic accounts. Samuel Beckett is Andrew K. Kennedy's contribution to the Cambridge series on British and Irish Authors. Kennedy, author of Six Dramatists in Search of a Language (1975) and Dramatic Dialogue (1983), here offers a critical introduction to Beckett's career. Samuel Beckett attempts to trace "the essential contours of the Beckettian terrain'' by combining an overview of literary and historical contexts with more particular exploration of individual texts. The "overall unity" asserted through this approach to Beckett's work is as follows: "a vision of diminishing human faculties (a tragicomic failing and falling) written into texts of diminishing language, ever more daringly lessened forms of drama and fiction" (p. 1). After a brief but concise introduction outlining the biographical, literary, and philosophical influences on Beckett's work, the book proceeds through analyses of the major plays between Waiting for Godot (1949) and Play (1963) and the trilogy of novels Molloy (1947), Malone Dies (1948), and The Unnamable (1950). The publisher's description promises a study that will constitute both a general critical introduction to Beckett's plays and "an original perspective ," a book "stimulating for both beginners and advanced students of Beckett" (p. i). That presses (such as Cambridge) should persist in trying to link these radically discrepant purposes and audiences remains bewildering since such constraints force intelligent critics (such as Kennedy) into an uncertain field of address where analytic sophistication must contend with more elementary discussion. This need to accommodate the beginner as well as the expert steers Kennedy into the general and the well-known; into the selection of "major" texts over the many less familiar works that provide much of the richness of the Beckettian canon; into familiar observations on such topics as plot, character, and dialogue; and into descriptions of Beckett's work in terms of "general human experience" (p. 33) and "metaphors for all time" (p. 81). 363 364Comparative Drama At the same time, however, Kennedy, often managing to transcend the limitations presented by the book's twin loyalties, brings striking insight to even the most well-worn "issues" concerning Beckett's drama and fiction. His discussion of Beckett's work is informed by a sure, yet unobtrusive command of literary and dramatic tradition, manuscript variants, and performance history; while often brief, his analyses are both focused and allusive. Although he occasionally retraces paths first cut in his earlier books, Kennedy is especially illuminating on questions of language: the "inner bilingualism" of Beckett's Anglo-Irish heritage (p. 6); the "chance writings . . . like 'found poems'" (p. 78) that Winnie reads on toothbrush and medicine bottle; and the narrative concern, in Mahne Dies, to find "a voice that can enact its own decay" (p. 131). It is arguably the plays that bring out the best in Kennedy's analysis, for the concern with dramatic language first evident in his earlier studies is enriched, in Samuel Beckett, by an attention to the actual stage and to the physical embodiment of speech. Hence, Kennedy characterizes Endgame as a "theatricalizing [of] the condition of the character prone to monologue" (p. 65) and Happy Days as a transforming of "literary fragments into theatrical events" (p. 82). In part because of its concern with the play as a "performance-driven dramatic score," this book will offer much even to the most...