Beckett's Texts Research Articles

A comparative study Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Ionesco’s Rhinoceros

The definition of ludicrous according to Eugene Ionesco is "that which is devoid of purpose. Man is lost when he is cut off from his transcendental, philosophical, and theological origins; all of his activities become ludicrous, meaningless, and pointless. Every time Ionesco defines the term ridiculous by referring to the same concept of the absurd, his representation of the absurd infers a paradox. The term "absurd" doesn't have a clear definition. Therefore, despite all attempts to provide meaning, the absurdity of the ludicrous exists in the situation of meaninglessness. The word "absurd" defies easy interpretation in Camus and Ionesco's statements. Ultimately, it is impossible to definitively define the word "absurd". How therefore may the concept of the Theatre of the Absurd be defined? The term's creator and leading theorist, Martin Esslin, claims that "the Theatre of the Absurd is a part of the "anti-literary" movement, which has found expression in abstract painting with its rejection of "literary" elements in pictures or in France's "new novel" with its reliance on the description of the objects and rejection of empathy and anthropomorphism." Esslin, like Camus and Ionesco, doesn't give the concept of the ridiculous a specific meaning. Instead, he is able to draw attention to the connection between European literature and abstract art from the 1940s and 1950s. A literary text either imparts or asks for the process of concretization anytime it interacts with the reader, therefore there may be an "abstract" painting but not a "abstract" piece of literature, one could say. "Absurdity" of the literary text appears to be the equivalent of "abstractness" in art in Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" and Ionesco's "Rhinoceros" due to the ways in which both concepts contest the established structures by undervaluing ideas or disobeying the rules of artistic and literary production in art and literature. However, these two works touch on the subject of resistance in the process of enacting it. As a result, a counter-performance occurs in Beckett's text, inviting the reader to interpret it in a different way. Or, the text of Ionesco shows a character against the enigmatically alluring, jouissance-like harmony of the rhinoceroses. Resistance ends up being the only defining trait of "Literature of the Absurd". Additionally, the absurdity of these poems is a result of resistance. Resistances represent both the idea of absurdity and the texts of the Theatre of the Absurd. As a conclusion, we might state that the concepts "absurd" and "absurdity" defy accurate definition and clear interpretation. Certain referents and signifieds cannot under any circumstances be associated with these words. Second, the absurdity of the texts is created by resistances that either the narration or the literary text's structure exhibits in the works that Martin Esslin refers to as texts of the Theatre of the Absurd. Exploration of the word "resistance" is necessary here.

“We're in the Endgame Now”: Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame as Contemporary Absurdism

The Journal of Popular CultureEarly View Original Article “We're in the Endgame Now”: Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame as Contemporary Absurdism Kelly I. Aliano, Corresponding Author Kelly I. Aliano [email protected] Search for more papers by this author Kelly I. Aliano, Corresponding Author Kelly I. Aliano [email protected] Search for more papers by this author First published: 19 June 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/jpcu.13193Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Works Cited Avengers. Directed by Joss Whedon, performances by Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans. Marvel Studios, 2012. Avengers: Endgame. Directed by Joe and Anthony Russo, performances by Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans. Marvel Studios, 2019. “‘Avengers: Endgame’ Has Taken Over the World. Let's Talk About Fan Service and Marvel's Legacy.” The New York Times, 1 May 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/movies/avengers-endgame-critics.html Avengers: Infinity War. Directed by Joe and Anthony Russo, performances by Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans. Marvel Studios, 2018. Batman Begins. Directed by Christopher Nolan, performances by Christian Bale and Katie Holmes. Warner Brothers Pictures, 2005. Beckett, Samuel. Endgame. Grove Press, 1958. Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. Grove Press, 1953. Black Panther. Directed by Ryan Coogler, performances by Chadwick Boseman and Michael B. Jordan. Marvel Studios, 2018. Blau, Herbert. Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett. U of Michigan P, 2000. Boulter, Jonathan. “Does Mourning Require a Subject? Samuel Beckett's Texts for Nothing.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 50, no. 2 2004, 332– 50. Canis, Laura, and Paul Canis. “ Jean-Paul Sartre Meets Enid Coleslaw: Existential Themes in Ghost World.” Comics As Philosophy, edited by Jeff McLaughlin, U of Mississippi P, 2005, pp. 130– 52. Captain America: Civil War. Directed by Joe and Anthony Russo, performances by Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans. Marvel Studios, 2016. Costello, Matthew J. “ Spandex Agonistes: Superhero Comics Confront the War on Terror.” Portraying 9/11: Essays on Representations in Comics, Literature, Film and Theatre, edited by Véronique Bragard, Christophe Dony, and Warren Rosenberg, McFarland, 2011, pp. 30– 43. Esslin, Martin. Theatre of the Absurd. Random House, 2004; originally published, 1962. Iron Man. Directed by Jon Favreau, performances by Robert Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow. Marvel Studios, 2008. Hagley, Annika and Michael Harrison. “The Amazing Renaissance of the Superhero Post 9/11.” The Conversation, 22 April 2014. https://theconversation.com/the-amazing-renaissance-of-the-superhero-post-9-11-25733 McLaughlin, Jeff. “ What If? DC's Crisis and Leibnizian Possible Worlds.” Comics As Philosophy, edited by Jeff McLaughlin, U of Mississippi P, 2005, pp. 3– 13. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “ Existentialism is a Humanism.” The Study of Philosophy, edited by S. Morris Engel, Angelika Soldan, and Kevin Durand, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2008, pp. 394– 410. Spider-Man: Far From Home. Directed by Jon Watts, performances by Tom Holland and Zendaya. Marvel Studios, 2019. Stevens, Dana. “Waiting for Thanos: Avengers: Endgame is Like Samuel Beckett with Superheroes.” Slate, 24 April 2019, https://slate.com/culture/2019/04/avengers-endgame-review-marvel-movie-samuel-beckett.html Superheroes: A Never-Ending Battle. Directed by Michael Kantor, hosted by Liev Schreiber. Ghost Light Films, 2013. Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. Directed by Sidney J. Furie, performances by Christopher Reeve and Gene Hackman. Warner Brothers, 1987. Thomson, Iain. “ Deconstructing the Hero.” Comics As Philosophy, edited by Jeff McLaughlin, U of Mississippi P, 2005, pp. 100– 29. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue ReferencesRelatedInformation

How It Was in Silling: Comment c’est and Les 120 journées de Sodome – An Intertextual Case Study

This paper offers a comparative case study of Samuel Beckett's Comment c'est (1961)/ How It Is (1964) and the Marquis de Sade's 120 journées de Sodome (1799). How It Is contains one of the only two explicit mentions of the notion of ‘sadism’ in Beckett's œuvre, and a close reading of both ‘novels’ provides definitive evidence that this particular occurrence refers not merely to a vulgarised, generic notion of cruelty, but to Sade's text specifically, thus confirming the presence of a direct intertextual borrowing, and showing that Beckett was indeed rereading the 120 jounées (or his notes on Sade) while writing Comment c'est. This paper argues for a Sadean impact on the form, themes and aesthetics of Beckett's text by way of a comparative reading blending empirical and interpretative approaches, paying close attention to the narrative and fictional strategies at work in Beckett's reception of the Sadean universe. Maurice Blanchot's essay ‘La raison de Sade’ (1949), which Beckett knew well, is used as critical framework to interpret the Sadean dimension of Beckett's last ‘novel’. This allows for new insights into the writing of this difficult work and casts a great deal of light on the evolution of Beckett's exploration of violence and alterity.

Samuel Beckett as World Literature

Samuel Beckett as World Literature

Beckett, Lacan, and the Mathematical Writing of the Real by Arka Chattopadhyay

Reviewed by: Beckett, Lacan, and the Mathematical Writing of the Real by Arka Chattopadhyay Fernanda Negrete Beckett, Lacan, and the Mathematical Writing of the Real. Arka Chattopadhyay. New York: Bloomsbury, 2019. Pp. 224. $135.00 (cloth); $39.95 (paper); $35.95 (eBook). How might the writings of Samuel Beckett and Jacques Lacan respond to each other? Arka Chattopadhyay pursues this question in a cogent project that foregrounds mathematics as a common terrain for these two contemporary authors, whose work developed in separate fields despite various relevant points of intersection. Beckett, Lacan, and the Mathematical Writing of the Real begins by acknowledging the missed encounters between Beckett and Lacan, given their shared context in postwar Paris among avant-garde writers, their awareness of each other, and even the coincidence of their birthday. The book demonstrates a psychoanalytic sensibility in remarking on the missed encounters, and above all in allowing them to promptly place the investigation on the path of the textual unconscious in terms of the mathematical letter. The author offers an attentive ear to only seemingly passing comments the writers in question made about each other: Beckett mentions that Lacan's "later work tends to become unreadable" (4), and Lacan in his 1970 text "Lituraterre" invokes Beckett's "dustbins" (5), while discussing the materiality of the letter and the litter of the unconscious. Chattopadhyay follows these traces to reveal the uniqueness of what he calls mathematical writing, which is crucial to both Beckett and Lacan's creativity. Through the term mathematical writing, Chattopadhyay brings into focus the two authors' use of concepts from mathematics as well as a formal dimension of writing that is concerned with a kind of transmission that leaves behind the interest in sharing meaning. Chattopadhyay reminds us that as long as writing is understood as a technology subordinated to speech and meaning, the relation between literature and psychoanalysis remains unidirectional. In this relation, psychoanalysis is an interpretive device applied to literature. There are many critical works that establish such relations between the fields, through applied psychoanalysis that attempts to interpret—that is to say, to explain away—literary texts, or even more often, their authors. But it is fair to say that Beckett's texts refuse this sort of treatment. Attempts at enforcing it can only yield a partial grasp of what Beckett's texts put to work. While his writing stands beyond Oedipal concerns, its modes and gestures remain highly relevant to analytic thinking, especially the kind that also ventures out beyond Oedipus, as it did in Lacan's teaching. Chattopadhyay's book introduces the Lacanian register of the Real in order to approach writing from a perspective suitable to Beckett's experiments. From the perspective of the Real, Chattopadhyay demonstrates that Beckett's texts in fact contribute to better understanding the [End Page 806] relevance of the Real. The latter operates outside realist ideals and norms in literature, especially. The Real also places the psychoanalytic clinic outside normative and adaptive goals; this aspect, however, is only discussed to the extent that Lacan presents it as a logical process that seeks the end of analysis with the construction of a sinthome and the analysand's becoming analyst. In an exposition of existing commentaries on the role of mathematics in Beckett's work, Chattopadhyay declares his interest in adding to this investigation psychoanalysis, whose function he describes "as a bridge of Real inscription between mathematics and literature" (17). In his foreword to the book, Anthony Ullman instead sees the mathematical as the original bridging element between Beckett and Lacan (ix). In fact, mathematics, psychoanalysis, and literature are each set forth in chapter one to operate as bridges that enable a discussion between the two other terms, in a triad the author extracts from multiple texts by Beckett and Lacan throughout the book's other chapters. Contributing to this ambitious bridging or knotting of fields are the admirable breadth and depth with which both figures' work is embraced in the book. Its engagement with Beckett offers to Lacanian readers useful examples of the logical implications of the French psychoanalyst's related concepts of the letter, sinthome, jouissance, lalangue, the One, and above all the Real, or of...

Is there a parallax in the mind? Samuel Beckett and distance in the psychic archive

ABSTRACT This paper examines the speculative presence of a parallax in the mind in the works of Samuel Beckett through the psychoanalytic lens of a Real parallax in the psychic archive. Navigating through Lacan, Žižek and Derrida, it establishes the parallax as a tool to ascertain psychic distance. The parallax sets out to measure the psychic topos that ultimately yield immeasurability as the essence of its vistas. The article goes through some important metaphorisations of the psyche as the inscribed space in Beckett's texts and finally zooms in on the late TV play … but the clouds … and his last extended prose text, Stirrings Still. Both these works historically warrant a parallax-reading as Beckett draws a parallax in one's stage directions and makes a cryptic inquiry about a psychic parallax, during the composition of the other. While the play uses the moving body as a cipher to chart the psychic space which establishes an insurmountable self-distance, a critical journey through the drafts of the prose-text exposes a complex notion of self-reference as a Real parallax of impossible distances.

Musical Code of Samuel Beckett’s Novel “Murphy”

The paper explores the ways in which music manifests itself on lexical-semantic, structural and rhythmic-syntactic levels of the novel “Murphy” (1938) by Samuel Beckett, whose Anglo- and Francophone writing is an attempt to synthesize prose and music. Beckett’s aesthetic ideas, his understanding of the expressivity of word and music were considerably influenced by Wittgenstein’s philosophy of linguistic skepticism and Schopenhauer’s vision of music as the only way of expressing the essence of the world.
 In his work, not only does Beckett combine the two forms of art through allusions and references, phonetic sound imitation or modeling of particular musical forms, but also makes an attempt to use the imagery of music and its ability to directly express feelings and thoughts, focusing on ‘semantic possibilities’ of music as a metaphor. Being sensitive to the sounding qualities of phrases in his works, Beckett perceived any sounds, even human ones, as music. He saturates the novel “Murphy” with auditory memories, rising and falling sounds, rhythms, melodies and musical categories, which enhance its musical effect. The diversity of musicality in Beckettian text is also manifested in the rhythmic organization, the presence of leitmotifs, and extensive use of verbal and structural repetitions.
 Therefore, Beckett’s method in “Murphy” involves using devices of musical expressiveness, as well as transforming the musical categories into metaphors of different experiences. Simultaneously, the rhythm of repetitions makes the emotional tonality of the work more distinct and creates the effect of intense movement of the consciousness.

Beckett, War Memory, and the State of Exception

Many of Samuel Beckett's texts are infused with the political knowledge and experiences of their author and remain tied to forms of war memory that resonate with conflicts past and present. Yet the type of political situation that Beckett pondered most consistently over the course of his career remains connected not to states of war, but to states of exception. The state of chronic suspension that has come to characterize his postwar texts has particularly powerful historical and transnational underpinnings and owes much to the cultural memory and political legacies of states of siege and emergency that have made so much of modern history.

Sounding Modernism: Rhythm and Sonic Mediation in Modern Literature and Film ed. by Julian Murphet, Helen Groth, and Penelope Hone

Reviewed by: Sounding Modernism: Rhythm and Sonic Mediation in Modern Literature and Film ed. by Julian Murphet, Helen Groth, and Penelope Hone Eleni Loukopoulou (bio) Sounding Modernism: Rhythm and Sonic Mediation in Modern Literature and Film, edited by Julian Murphet, Helen Groth, and Penelope Hone. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. viii + 254 pp. £75.00 cloth, £24.99 paper, £75.00 ebook. This groundbreaking collection of essays explores how rhythm and sound were mediated in modern literature and film during the period 1890–1950. The contributors deploy theoretical approaches from sound and media studies to foreground their sonic aesthetics through multiple perspectives. A key point of reference for the editors and the contributors to this volume is Roland Barthes's essay "Listening" and his distinction that "[h]earing is a physiological phenomenon; listening is a psychological act."1 As the editors explain, "[l]istening in this sense is a selfconsciously critical process, requiring far more of the reader than the automatic internalisation of an aesthetic ideal" (8). Barthes's analysis influenced Garrett Stewart's methods in his Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext; by privileging "listening over hearing" (8), he persuasively stresses the complex processes of literary reading and the "receptivity of the body to phonic and graphic mediations—from the brain's cognitive rhythms to the reverberating surfaces of the diaphragm, throat, tongue, and palate" (8).2 Taking this research into consideration, the editors highlight the significance of Sounding Modernism and explain that "[t]he rich nexus of new sound-recording technologies, new vocabularies of and for sonic phenomena, new standardisations of rhythm and speed, and the weird displacements of 'voice' peculiar to modernity offer unparalleled resonators for the period in literary history known as modernism" (4). Specifically, they draw attention to the impact of the gramophone record and how it interrelates to the way writers used the technique of onomatopoeia in innovative ways. They highlight the fact that [w]hen Joyce came to inscribe the sounds made by the Blooms' domes-tic cat in Ulysses (1922), what mattered (for the first time in literary history) was not the settled national conventions of a "meow," "miaow" or "miau," but the infinitesimal intra-textual distinctions between a "Mkgnao!" a "Mrkgnao!" and a "Mrkrgnao!," not to mention an irregular "Gurrhr!" (7) The editors elucidate such distinctive word formations by convincingly asserting that "it is far from an exegetical stretch to insist that all of this fanatical attention to the letter-by-letter specificity of onomatopoeia's exquisite new pedantries in Joyce's hands can be traced to the impact of a machine that was automatically recording sounds [End Page 192] as sounds and not as alphabetical glyphs" (7). Apart from onomatopoeia, one of the editors, Julian Murphet, is interested in the theoretical analysis of sounds that are soundless, "transposed synaesthetically into image" in modernist texts (20). This becomes the focal point in Murphet's essay. Among others, Murphet explores silence in Samuel Beckett's Texts for Nothing.3 Examining the final Text 13, Murphet highlights Beckett's preoccupation with silence and repetition and the way he breaks "down the units of sense into a perforated surface of sheer language as such" attaining silence "by way of a murmur," producing thus a "prose murmur" (32). Similarly, the examination of silence or ellipsis, but this time in relation to the representation of race, is central in Julie Beth Napolin's contribution. As she observes, in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises,4 a black jazz musician's speech moves further and further away from representation, being first a dialect rendering of a racialised timbre. … [T]he matter of his voice is left unnarrated, calling upon the reader's inner sense of sound and that reader's archive of racial associations of voice. It is then a singing, a chanting, until finally it is an ellipsis, a spacing out within written discourse itself. (122) She concludes that, "[w]hile the racialised sound object has been marginalised, it remains 'in' the narrative in elided and distorted (but also compressed) form. The racialised drummer is 'there,' at the audiovisual margins of narratability: the ellipsis is a visualised fracture in articulation" (123). The perception of speech...

Translating and Adapting Company for the Screen

This essay deals with the problems of translating and adapting Company for the screen. The first part focuses on the problems encountered in translating Beckett's English text into Spanish, highlighting the difficulty of translating voices and of keeping close not only to the sense but also to the rhythm of Beckett's poetic language. The second part deals with problems of adaptation of the text for the screen. My Compania follows closely Chabert's and Gontarski's stage adaptations of 1984 and 1985, which were supervised by Beckett, but it also departs from them. Finally, I discuss the screen version of Compania, enti tled Voz, and directed by Javier Aguirre, with one of the greatest Spanish actors Fernando Fernan-Gomez in the role of the protagonist.

Samuel Beckett's ‘Psychology Notes’ and The Unnamable

This essay reexamines Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable by treating his ‘Psychology Notes’ as part of the genetic dossier for this text. By developing a parallel between The Unnamable and ‘textbook’ psychoanalysis in terms of a shared obsession with abjection, the essay will demonstrate that some of the symptoms and obsessions suffered by the unnamable voice (‘prison psychosis’, ‘coprosymbolism’ and ‘genital discharge’) are traceable to the Notes. At the same time, the commitment to cure, control and explanation in psychoanalysis is resisted, and Beckett's text ultimately stages a failed talking cure. The genetic identification of these intertextual connections is enhanced by the availability of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (BDMP). Using the same scholarly tool, the essay also examines some of the variations between the English and the French versions of the text, in order to shed further light on the significance of the Notes to the manuscript corpus of L'Innommable/The Unnamable.

Between “Little Latitude” and a “Discreet Liberty”

Abstract As with any other author, the contradiction between fidelity and license is an important issue to take into account when translating Beckett. However, working with a Beckett text presents a unique characteristic, in that he himself provided versions of his novels and plays into English and French. This article examines the position of the translator as regards Beckett’s bilingualism and considers the effects that this situation may have in the translator’s practice. Additionally, a minimum set of principles are suggested as guidelines when translating Beckett into a third language.

‘Lovely beyond Words’: Beckett, Value, Critique

In recent years there have been numerous pronouncements by diverse figures in the humanities, including Bruno Latour, Rita Felski and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, that critique and ‘paranoid reading’ has run out of steam. There has been renewed attention to form, the ‘literary’, affect and the phenomenology of reading. What are the implications of this new turn for Beckett studies? Is it possible to articulate a positive value for a writer that undoes value, without simply recuperating him or her into the cultural economy? This essay is in two parts, counterpointed but complementary. The first takes a metacritical approach, elaborating synergies in Beckett and wider developments in academic literary studies. The second offers a close reading of Beckett's late prose text ‘All Strange Away’, from which I derive my titular quotation. This late work is both deeply engaged with and explicitly resistant to the Western aesthetic tradition, especially Romanticism. It deploys cultural and literary traces of aesthetic tradition, but only to parody and deface them, leaving for instance the imagination/fancy distinction blurred and suggestive, and the whole equipment for judgment uncomfortably residual and remaindered. Yet for all the play on auto-critique and self-cancellation, the text keeps the imagination flickering, precisely in the self-reflexive domain. The imagined death of the imagination, endures as the remainder, preventing the actual death and thereby keeping the possibility of valuation in process. We begin to find it in the percussive accompaniment enacted by the language: the unmistakable cadences and symmetries of Beckett's own prose. Ultimately a close reading of Beckett reveals the patterns and shapes of the prose and the drama, which as Adorno pointed out, gesture towards emancipatory possibilities without naming them. The pleasure of reading Beckett emerges from the dialectic of estrangement and recognition, mixing the uncanny and patterned linguistic markers. These signposts are found in the language, in the rhythms, patterns, repetitions and variations highlighted by a formalist criticism attentive to the phenomenology of reading.

A Machine for Feeling:Ping's Posthuman Affect

Beckett's famous claim that his writing seeks to ‘work on the nerves of the audience, not the intellect’ points to the centrality of affect in his work. But while his writing's affective quality is widely acknowledged by readers of his work, its refusal of intellect has made it difficult to take fully into account in scholarly work on Beckett. Taking Beckett's 1967 short prose text Ping as a case study, this essay is an attempt to take the affective qualities of Beckett's writing seriously and to consider the implications of his affectively dense writing for his texts’ relationship to history. I argue that Ping's affect emerges from the rhythms of its prose, producing a highly ‘speakable’ text in which affect precedes interpretation. In Ping, however, this affective rhythmic patterning is portrayed as mechanical, the product of the machinic ‘ping’ that punctuates the text and the text's own mechanical rhythms, demanding the active involvement of the reader.The essay concludes by arguing that Ping's mechanised affect is a specifically historical feeling. Arising from a specifically twentieth-century anxiety about technology's tendency to evacuate ‘natural’ emotion in favour of inhuman affect, it participates in a tradition of affectively resonant but curiously blank or indifferent performances of cyborg embodiment. Read in this historical light, Ping's implication of the reader in the production of its mechanised affect grants it, from our contemporary perspective, an archival quality. At the same time, it asks us to broaden the way in which we understand the Beckettian text's relationship to history, pointing to the existence of a more complex and recursive relationship between literature, its historical moment, and our contemporary moment of reading. Such a post-archival historicism sees texts as generated by but not bound to their historical moments of composition, and understands the moment of reception as an integral, if shifting, part of the text's history.

From Murphy’s Irrational Heart to Beckett’s Worsening Word

In his 1937 letter to Axel Kaun, Beckett says that he is setting off for the beyond of the “word surface.” This trajectory is diverted when he goes on to indicate that he is also drawn to working with that surface itself when it is considered as having the plasticity of a fabric. Reading Murphy with “Comment Dire” / “What is the Word,” this paper proposes that the Beckettian text, of whatever period, can be taken as enacting this diversion: from the quest for a truth beyond to making present that fabric which is produced, immediately to hand, by the very act of writing.

Lacan and Beckett

Building on the dialectical tension between neuro-cognitivism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, this article approaches the Beckettian text to localize acts of writing that take place between psychoanalysis and literature. In opposition to the cognitivist model of neuronal relationality, it uses the Lacanian logic of Real non-relation as an inroad into Beckett to explore the material frontier of Beckettian writing where relational meaning reaches its limit. At this limit, we are left with a complex writing between speech and inscription that makes the body of the signifier write against its sense.

“Strange laughter”: Post-Gothic Questions of Laughter and the Human in Samuel Beckett's Work

The laughter of Samuel Beckett's characters is frequently strange and unsettling. Characters laugh unpredictably, and the reader or spectator does not feel prompted to join them; when we do laugh in response to the Beckettian text, we are often shocked by our own lack of propriety. I examine laughter theory and the laughter in Gothic texts to explore why Beckettian laughter so disconcerts us, and what the implications of this affective response are for our understanding of what constitutes the human, and of our own ostensibly human identities.

‘Let What Happens Happen’: The Whitelaw Archive

This article examines the archival material donated by the estate of Billie Whitelaw to the University of Reading, after the actor's death. The material sheds light on the actress' approach to Beckett's plays, and illuminates the nature of the working relationship between Whitelaw and Beckett. However, the material is also of interest because it sheds light on a series of questions raised by Jonathan Heron and Nicholas Johnson in the recent performance edition of Journal of Beckett Studies (JOBS 23.1). These questions concern the nature of genetic labour in the archive, as related to performance. In other parts of the archive, genetic labour aims to uncover the stages through which a piece of writing attained its published (or abandoned) form. In the theatre, the process of rehearsal is itself a process of genetic labour, which aims to interrogate, not the author's preferred version of the text, but the version agreed by a number of artists working in collaboration. In the theatre, the question of the actor's performative intention, and the labour through which that intention is realised, is an important part of any archival exploration. The Whitelaw archive is valuable, this article argues, because it enables us to trace the formation of a particular approach to Beckett's texts, undertaken through a process of genetic labour on the texts themselves, rather than on the character or situation that the texts suggest.

Beckett, Vichy, Maurras, and the Body: Premier amour and Nouvelles

This essay is about the relation between the treatment of the body in Beckett's major French texts of 1945–6 and the Vichy regime. It examines Vichy conceptions of physical life and their effect on Beckett's texts, considering those texts as responses to them. It addresses the ideological construction of the body in France 1940–4 and its connection with Vichy pastoralism, folkloric regionalism, natalism, familialism, and paternalism; the historical materiality of mutilated, impoverished, ‘inferior’, and expelled bodies and their significance under Vichy; and the influence on the Vichyite conception of the body of Le Play, Barrès, and above all Maurras, his nationalism, provincialism, and reactionary aesthetics. Beckett's letters show him to have been dismissive of these influences. Premier amour and the Nouvelles repeatedly evoke certain features of the experience of bodily life under Vichy. They also conduct a war on Vichyite, Pétainist, and Maurrasian body politics and its moral terrorism, not least because the ideological construction of the body in Vichy France was strikingly close to that in de Valera's Ireland. The texts are a weird, ironical hymn to incapacity, to the ‘second-rate’ or ‘defective’ body. This in turn dictates the specific character of Beckett's break with representation at this time.

The Hidden Rabe: Kafka's Openings and Beckett's Cage

This essay explores the ways Kafka's transnational perspective works underground in Beckett's texts and mediates his move to French. The banning of Kafka's books in Germany, where Beckett spent parts of 1936–37, and Molloy (born “from my mother's arse”) are seen as Beckett's creative identification with the expelled. Moran's inability to digest the “Lager” in Molloy, and the visit of “Gaber”—anagrams “Rabe,” the Kafka/crow that escapes the “Grabe” or grave of banished but lively literary influences in this post–World War II process. Beckett's comment that Kafka's “form was not shaken by the experience it conveys” (1962) re-articulates such ingestion as part of the process of canonical creation. Beckett's translinguistic French style, and separation from Joyce, are shown to be mediated by Kafka, who provided Beckett with a “way out” from the impasse of following in Joyce's wake. “Ooftish,” with its English-Yiddish title, appearing alongside Kafka's “The Housefather's Care” (1938), are shown to be crucial to Beckett's transition to a postnational perspective. The essay concludes with Beckett's “Premier Amour” (1946) and 1938 essay “Les Deux Besoins,” where a kind of geometric method analyzes the interaction of “deux essences,” illustrated with a “sort of Star of David” (Rabaté): a “dodecahedron” that alludes to the re-creation of overlapping languages in Beckett's later work.