Where Never Before: Beckett’s Poetics of Elsewhere/La poétique de l’ailleurs ed. by Sjef Houppermans

Abstract

that poetry is a better path to truth than philosophy since it effectively mimics the act of formation of the world in all its complexity. The sixth chapter, “Distinctio: l’ordre des choses,” describes the innovations Du Bartas makes in the first three days, showing how the four elements provide the hermeneutic framework to organize the physical world. Chapter seven, “Oranatus: les langages de la science,” elaborates a new scientific and poetic language capable of representing the conflicting aspects of the liminal zone of Du Bartas’s Creation. Giacomotto-Charra concludes by pointing out that La Sepmaine unites sixteenth-century poetic and philosophical writings; like the elemental world which it describes, Du Bartas’s poetry is subject to circular generation and is constantly redefining itself. This reader would have liked a proposal for new nomenclature, but GiacomottoCharra merely restates the fact that the particularity of such poetry is that it escapes not only definition but also our systems of representation. Such ambivalence, combined with extensive quotation on mimesis from Tasso, make for a disappointing end to an otherwise thorough and well-researched work which focuses on Aristotle but relies on countless others to elucidate Du Bartas’s unique take on the Creation myth. University of Mary Washington (VA) Brooke Donaldson Di Lauro HOUPPERMANS, SJEF, et al., eds. Where Never Before: Beckett’s Poetics of Elsewhere/La poétique de l’ailleurs. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 21. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. ISBN 978-90-420-2814-2. Pp. 256. 52 a. Volume twenty-one of Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui takes its title from Beckett’s late poem “Brief Dream”: “Go where never before / no sooner there than there always.” As a whole, the essays comprising this volume can be said to serve, oftentimes beautifully, as a reflection on this enigmatic theme. Twenty years into its history, the review both returns to its origins and opens up exciting new pathways toward what might lie in its future. The editors begin with a note tracing the history of what has quickly become the essential international forum for Beckett studies, as it was launched by Sjef Houppermans and Matthijs Engelberts, both still acting editors, along with Marius Buning, who passed away in 2008. This issue, then, is in honor of Buning, whose tireless devotion to the journal is described by the editors with heartfelt grace and appreciation. Alongside his editorial work, Buning published two important essays in the journal (in volumes one and nine), in which he primarily approached Beckett through the themes of allegory and negative theology. The lasting contribution of Buning’s work is acknowledged by a few dedicatory essays here, notably those by Chris Ackerley and Mary Bryden, and his approach to Beckett is most thoroughly and lucidly explored by Anthony Uhlmann in the volume’s remarkable opening piece, “Negative Allegory.” Uhlmann deftly explicates the two themes originally undertaken by Buning and explores how they can be taken together as a single entity, one that might lead to a rich and as yet unexplored means of understanding Beckett’s work. Uhlmann borrows chiefly from Paul de Man’s now canonical conception of modern allegory, understood here as a rhetorical system “in which one system of signs doubles or reflects a second system” (19); it is a mode of signification that is “fragmented and subjective” (18), rather than reliant 950 FRENCH REVIEW 85.5 on the compulsive one-to-one correspondence with which many generations associated the form. Freed from the strictures of direct correspondence, modern allegory becomes “a form that allows literary texts to engage with abstract systems, or fragments of abstract systems, so as to generate meanings that bring us into contact with these systems” (23). Thus understood, allegory becomes structurally analogous to the method of the via negativa, in that both become productive means of expressing the unsayable, of finding meaning in what in itself remains, as it were, unnamable. While Uhlmann most explicitly tackles these two paths toward understanding Beckett, many of the volume’s remaining essays might be called implicit examples of what Uhlmann calls “negative allegory” (25), or the production of meaning out of the apparent sign of its absence. Uhlmann’s formulation is remarkable...