Waiting for Death: The Philosophical Significance of Beckett's En attendant Godot by Ramona Cormier and Janis L. Pallister, and: The Transformations of Godot by Frederick Busi (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews 121 annotated bibliography ofscholarship, criticism, reviews, memoirs. and other commentary on Synge and his writings. The volume is another in a superbly edited G.K. Hall series that now includes works on Osborne, Pinter, and Miller, among others. After a compact review of research (pp. vii-xxii), Kopper traces the year-by-year reaction to Synge, from Yeats'scasual mentionofa man who knew a lot about the Arao Islands to a 1977 encyclopedic estimate of Synge as one of "the great quadrumvirate of twentiethcentury dramatists" (p. 178), A consecutive reading of the bibliography yields a clear sense ofboth the public reception ofSynge's works and the developing scholarly view of him. Besides being illuminating in this sense, the annotations seem cogent and accurate throughout. The volume is a true "reference guide" to Synge. No bibliography is wholly comprehensive, however. Kopper must be commended for his thorough coverage ofSynge material - especially since he tackles foreign-language items as well as those in English (mostly recorded already in the book-length, but unannotated, bibliographies ofE.H. Mikhail and Paul M. Levitt) - butit was rash ofhim to claim that his work is "complete through 1976," listing "anything of importance said or written on Synge" (p. xxi). The following list of a half-dozen substantial items that appeared just between 1970 and 1972 will show how rash his statement is, -while not detracting from the overall value of his contribution: BARONE, ROSANGELA. ''Thomas Hardy e John MiBington Synge: alcuneaffinitA." Annali della Facoltd di Lingue e LetteratureStraniere, 1-2 (1970-71), 6-32. BECKERMAN, BERNARD. Dynamics ofDrama: Theory andMethod ofAnalysis. New York: Knopf, [970, pp. 64-77 (on Riders 10 the Sea). BERGNER, HEINZ. "Synge: The Playboy ofthe Western World." Pp. 202-16 ofDieter Mehl, ed. Das englische Drama: vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. II. Dusseldorf: Bagel,1970. CSASZAR, EDE. "The Playboy ofthe Western World." AngolisAmerikaiFilo16giai Tanulmanyok, I (1971), 196-20'). DALMASSO, MICHtLE. "The Playboy ofthe Western World:langue et imagination populaires." EtudesAnglaises etAmericaines, 5 (1972), 49- 67. ZYDLER, TOMASZ. "John Millington Synge and the Irish Theatre." Kwartalnik Neofilologiczny , 18 (197[), 383-96. CHARLES A. CARPENTER, SUNY - BINGHAMTON RAMONA CORMIER AND JA NIS L. PALLlSTER. Waiting for Death: The Philosophical Significance of Beckett's En attendant Godot. University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press 1979· Pp. iv, 155· FREDERICK BUS!. The'Transformations ofGodot. Lexington: University Press of KenlUcky 1980. pp.xiii, 143. One immediate response to Ramona Connier and Janis L. Pallister's Waitingfor Death might be to question what this book does which much earlier studies such as Frederick J. Hoffman's Samuel Beckett: TheLanguageoISe/f([962), Ruby Cohn's Sam"el Beckett: The Comic Gamut (1962), Hugh Kenner's Samuel Beckett (1968), Michael Robinson's The Lang Sonata 01 the Dead (1969), and David Hesla's The Shape 01 Chaos ([97[) 122 Book Reviews have not already done quite splendidly. A footnote proclaiming that Hesla's "work appeared after our study was complete" (p. 122, n. 2) does not mitigate the problem of originality; it only compounds the enigma of publication: where has this manuscript been for the past eight or more years? The "Bibliography of Works Consulted" relies heavily on pUblications from the 1950'S and '60'S; there is no entry later than the Hesta, 1971. Why was the manuscript not updated? Another difficulty with this study involves its stated double purpose. "First ... to evaluate the deluge of critical opinions concerning Samuel Beckett's En attendant Gadot and through a careful analysis of the text to establish what appear to be the most satisfactory among these many opinions" (p. J). But the book is not organized in a way to make these (rather spotty) relative evaluations readily accessible; a much more useful brief analysis of previous scholarship (to stay with books compiled at the same time as Waiting for Death) is to be found in Melvin 1. Friedman's introduction to Samuel Beckett Now (1970), a book apparently not known to Cormier and Pallister. The second purpose - to extract "from this play the 'world view' of Beckett" (p. I) - is even more problematic, not only because of the intrinsic difficulties which those quotation marks imply, and not only because of...