Beckett's Narrative Research Articles

‘Consequences of this Climate’: Disabling Environmental Effects in Beckett's Late Work

This article analyses the change in the representation of disability in Beckett's work from medical impairments in the 1940s and 1950s to bodies that are limited by environmental conditions from the 1960s onwards. I suggest the term ‘disability effects’ to describe the condition of characters who are limited or harmed by the harsh environments of Beckett's imagination. A ‘disability effect’ arises from the interaction between a harmful environment and a human body through conditions such as confinement, toxic atmosphere, or extreme heat. While the social model of disability is useful for reading disability in the earlier works, it does not adequately account for the environmental pressures that lead to disability effects. Instead, the ecological–enactive model developed by Toro et al. provides a better framework that allows for a variety of subjective responses to the restrictions imposed by the Beckett's narrative ecologies. The representation of disability in Beckett's later work thus places at the centre of attention harmed bodies that are marginalised in too many discourses around the Anthropocene or held up as a warning sign for the terrible consequences of inaction, and can be read as a critique of ableist attitudes, which are also common in environmental movements. As climate change has become a present reality rather than a future danger to be averted, a rapidly changing environment is generating a range of disability and disability effects affecting whole populations and amplifying the shortcomings of the ableist social model that views disability as an exception that must be accommodated by an abled society. Beckett's work can help us come to terms with the continuity of adverse conditions, while leaving a space for the variability of personal adaptations.

Silence Speaks Volume in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Krapp's Last Tape

Silence Speaks Volume in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Krapp's Last Tape

Beckett and the Modern Novel

John Bolin's succinctly titled book traces Samuel Beckett's development as a novelist from 1930 to 1950 through an attention to his formative literary precursors. Bolin argues that Beckett scholarship has tended to overemphasize the philosophical underpinnings of his work and not given sufficient consideration to his evolving ‘theory and practice of the novel’ (p. 6). In an effort to remedy this lack, Bolin studies Beckett's novels in chronological order, from Dream of Fair to Middling Women to Malone Dies (with a brief nod to The Unnamable in the Conclusion), and anchors his textual readings in associations he draws between Beckett's narrative techniques and those of prior writers. Bolin's critical approach is generated by the idea that understanding ‘the source of [a] technique’ (p. 51) — the act of correctly identifying literary influences — enables readers to historicize, contextualize, and thus interpret properly the aims of Beckett's aesthetic project. Bolin elaborates fascinating connections that demonstrate the breadth of his archival research: he shows, for example, how Beckett's lectures on Gide in 1930, which emphasize (according to students' notes) Gide's anti-realist stance, resistance to narrative closure, experiments with mise-en-abyme structures, and interest in self-reflexivity, profoundly shaped Beckett's own narrative practices and his writing of Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Murphy, Watt, and the Trilogy. Bolin's two chapters on Watt, heavily reliant on a close engagement with Beckett's notebooks held in the Harry Ransom Center archive at the University of Texas at Austin, study the evolution of the novel and its ‘new narrative mode of questioning and reasoning’ (p. 86) that anticipates Beckett's later texts. Attending to Beckett's correspondence, Bolin identifies other literary influences such as Sade, Céline, and Sartre — his chapter on La Nausée as a source text for Molloy in their similar critique of the diary form as ‘a master-narrative of self-discovery and salvation’ (p. 138) is particularly sharp — but Bolin's primary concern throughout his study is more with Gide as a literary precursor than with any other modern writer. Given its unstated but important resonances with Harold Bloom's notion of ‘an anxiety of influence’, Bolin's study could have done more to theorize the ways in which literary influence itself complicates and unsettles an author's relationship with his or her textual production. Did Beckett, following Bloom's general argument, ever misread or wilfully distort his predecessors as a means of carving out a space for his own aesthetic creativity? Such an inquiry into the transparency of literary legacy, and its consequent elusive nature as a conceptual and methodological frame, would help to deepen the novel insights and compelling discoveries that Bolin articulates throughout Beckett and the Modern Novel.

GRESSION, REGRESSION, AND BEYOND: A Cognitive Reading of

1. Introduction: A Cognitive JourneyIt is fairly odd discovering, in letter to Georges Duthuit at very beginning of June 1949 - only two months after having started to draft The Unnamable, in one of gloomiest periods of his creative career - Beckett was reading Around World in 80 Days, positively classified as lively stuff (LSB II, 163). Given descending, excavating nature of last novel of trilogy, it would have been less surprising to find mention of equally famous masterpiece by Verne, Voyage au centre de la Terre (1864). Yet, in less local scrutiny, both horizontal, superficial (and significantly circular) orbit of Phileas Fogg's enterprise, and vertical, geologically stratified axis of Professor Lidenbrok's quest are present in Beckett's narrative work. However, these two movements are not simultaneously operative, but rather are subsequently exploited throughout Beckett's narrative trajectory. As Mark Nixon elucidates, sometime after Murphy there is turning point in how trope of journey is treated in Beckett's fiction, since Beckett has accepted that there was no 'to' or 'towards', and thus no redemptive destination (191). The horizontal pointless excursions of Belacqua across Irish cityscapes or Murphy's wandering in outer of London progressively come to an end in trilogy - passing, as Shane Weller argues, from object-world or subject-world of Murphy to flight from all world in Malone meurt (Weller, 109). This is not to say trope of journey disappears from Beckett's literary imagination. Rather, as Nixon indicates, it remains central to Beckett's postwar work, but is negated (97) or, would suggest, inverted (The Unnamable being a kind of inverted spiral, (Beckett 2009, 310)). The horizontal plane of movement is replaced by vertical expedition, and Belacqua's gression (Beckett 2010, 33) is substituted by an inward plunge, of which The Unnamable constitutes endless bottom. In this narrative manoeuvre, different 'towardness' emerges, for Beckett understands, as we shall see, outward journey in search of self is wrong figure (qtd. in Knowlson, 247). An alternative exploration has to be directed on way to what he calls of (247) by going beyond what is called in Molloy the surface leaden above infernal depths (Beckett 2009, 73) of mind from which illusion of selfhood stems.In present article, want to account for this second speleological journey in Beckett's fictional work by drawing on contemporary cognitive theories of self.1 On one hand, want to suggest that, in The Unnamable, Beckett does indeed reach some kind of centre of subjective planet, structure and functions of which resemble those qualities philosopher of mind Daniel Dennett attributes to what he calls center of narrative gravity (1991, 418). This parallel should enrich interpretation of outcome of this expedition, with discovery feeling of seed of (narrative) motion is false sensory impression responsible for stupid obsession with depth (Beckett 2009, 287), which in turn accounts for conception and perception of self as an internal locus of subjectivity. Furthermore, put this narrative account of self into relation with two distinct problems related to self-consciousness: namely, problems of circularity and of infinite regress. As we shall see, The Unnamable can be read as fictional rendering of these two complications indissolubly bounded to an ontology of self-knowledge. On other hand, elaborate on remarkable similarities between three-levels model of self proposed by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio (2010), and distinct cognitive levels narrator of The Unnamable lets reader perceive, especially by pointing beyond its linguistic existence. In letter to Aidan Higgins in 1952, Beckett wrote about The Unnamable as the end of jaunt, going further by saying I used to think all [t]his work was an effort, necessarily feeble, to express nothing. …

“Ill-Told Ill-Heard”: Aurality and Reading in

This paper investigates the question of aurality in Beckett's narrative and radiophonic works of the early sixties. It focuses on and its English translation , considered here as a central work in Beckett's intermedial practice of hybridisation between genres and media. At the cross-roads between a novel and a radio play, between written and spoken word, enacts the performance of the reader as a silent listener. Corporality and language overlap in the text as the novel builds up the metaphor of the human body as a medium.

Stretching Language to Its Limit: Deleuze and the Problem of Poiesis

Here I begin with Lecercle's assumption that language is a ”problem” for Deleuze, who like Beckett wants to demonstrate the limits of (literary, poetic) language yet can only do so by writing. In ”He Stuttered” Deleuze says truly experimental poets stretch the two (initially associative and syntactic) axes of langue to a point ”far from equilibrium” where they begin to ”stutter” and words (like atoms) begin to self-divide and redouble. After exploring this model and Deleuze's related discussion of Beckett's narrative praxis of ”exhausting logical possibilities” in ”The Exhausted,” I point out that although he specifically rejects ”metaphor” as a term tied to classical semiotics, and in his discussions of Beckettian exhaustion and the stuttering langue-machine (which vibrates the classical metaphoric-metonymic axes beyond recognition) does seem to overthrow semiotics, Deleuze's own discourse seems constantly driven by metaphorical language. For instance, the notion that beyond langue lies ”silence” is itself a poetic (metaphorical) rather than ”logical” one, as is the argument that Beckett's inclusive-disjunctive ”non-style” tries to ”give the possible a reality that is itself exhaustible.” In a final section I show how a model based on the background noise (not sound/silence) of information theory can be fruitfully compared with Deleuze's vibrating-langue model, and suggest that the former may actually be a simpler, more ”efficient” model.

“Something Wrong There”:Punning inComment C'est

This essay focuses on the puns in the French version of Samuel Beckett's novel Comment C'est . Beckett's narrative consists of the transcription of a voice poorly recorded from an unknown source. Hence, in Comment C'est , the narrative, full of misstatements and misleading declarations, builds on an inadequate transcription of the oral, allowing puns to interfere with the understanding of the story. Beckett's use of puns calls our attention to the signifying processes' constant deferral of meaning and reveals the essence-less quality of language theorized by Derrida. Wordplay makes clear the lack of interdependence between the signifier and signified, implying a possible failure of communication and the illusion of origin and presence.

Stories for Nothing: Samuel Beckett's Narrative Poetics by Paul B. Kelley (review)

478 Reviews ceremonial failure, the self-conscious attempt to find redemption through gestural sacrifice, rather than through pragmatic military strategy. McDonald's opening chapter moves from an intelligently wary analysis of the apparently endless series of qualifications and hair-splitting discriminations surrounding definitions of tragedy, and the restlessness of twentieth-century tragedy in its inherited forms and traditions, to a specific discussion of tragedy and Irish cultural history. He is at his most incisive on the various 'tragic' readings of Irish historical events?the Great Famine, the 1916 Rising, the 'Troubles'?suggesting various models of tragedy through which these have been constructed or rehabilitated: ritualistic sacrifice, heroism in defeat, nobility. Despite its prevalence in the Irish historical imagination, all three of McDonald's chosen writers react against this tendency in differentways. Although his choice of Synge, O'Casey, and Beckett is made for reasons of contrast as well as comparison, all three dramatists under consideration, just as they react against the mythic values of the Celtic Revival, react against the sort of ritualistic mythology that transforms failure into success. Synge's drama veers between confrontation with the squalor of peasant life and a lyrical evasion of it, while O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars was one of the firstand most notable attempts to usurp the prevalent 'heroic' with the wasteful view of the 1916 Rising. Beckett's plays, on the other hand, demonstrate an inability to cohere into anything approaching tragic grandeur. All three are celebrated forstylistic and generic heterogeneity, forentwining comic and tragic moods; in terms of classical or strictly Hellenic definitions of tragedy, all three would seem unlikely tragedians. This study identifies central issues in the three dramatists?evasion in Synge, meliorism in O'Casey, confusion in Beckett?through which central issues in tragic theory and their drama's very various relations to the central conundrum of 'tragic value' can be discussed. However, a strength of the book is that, rather than testing the three authors against a predetermined definition of tragedy, McDonald aims to examine their philosophies and aesthetics of suffering,loss, and guilt within less exclusive framing ideas of tragedy. Much of the value of Tragedy and Irish Literature is simply in the application of tragic theory?a notoriously defensive and exclusive school, reluctant to admit into the company of Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Racine anything smacking of evasion, meliorism, or confusion?to a disparate trio of dramatists whose modernity and en? gagement with ('tragic'?) Irishness puts them in a less straightforward relation with tragedy. McDonald's study both yields insights into what definitions of tragedy say about the society which makes them, and, farfromcoercing a trio of disparate drama? tists into a classical definition of tragedy to which they have no allegiance, uses the exigencies and nuances of tragic theory as a way of casting new light on three distinct oeuvres. National University of Ireland, Galway Sinead Mooney Stories for Nothing: Samuel Beckett's Narrative Poetics. By Paul B. Kelley. Fore? word by Sjef Houppermans. (Currents in Comparative Romance Languages and Literatures, iii) New York, Bern, and Frankfurt a.M: Peter Lang. 2002. xv+ 198 pp. ?37. ISBN 0-8204-5791-4. Paul B. Kelley has derived his title from the 1967 Grove Press compilation published in England as No's Knife: Collected Shorter Prose ig4y-ig66. As unpublished corre? spondence reveals, Beckett's working title for what was to become Stories and Texts for Nothing in the USA was Stories Stories, the collection initially comprising the post-war nouvelles (his firstprose fiction to be composed originally in French) and the recent 'residua', the Texts in new English versions being added at the last minute. MLR, 99.2, 2004 479 In his six chapters framed by an introduction and conclusion Kelley not unnaturally includes the Texts (or rather the Textes, since throughout he quotes from Beckett's French and from his English only to highlight a point), but excludes the nouvelles, which are not even mentioned in the index. Beckett self-confessedly thought them the 'uninteresting' part of his 'little book of odds and ends', but they were steps on the way to Molloy (Kelley's starting point) and there was surely room for...

Review: Stories for Nothing: Samuel Beckett's Narrative Poetics

1University of Bristol Stories for Nothing: Samuel Beckett’s Narrative Poetics Paul B. Kelley Bern — Oxford — New York (Currents in Comparative Romance Languages and Literatures, 111). Peter Lang 2002 xvi + 200 Hardback£37.00

FILM IN CONTEXT(S)

Beckett's only work for cinema, Film, continues to occupy a peripheral, marginal position in the ever-growing bibliography of Beckett criticism. Without denying that the shift into the cinematic medium resonates with issues common in Beckett's narrative and dramatic œuvre, I intend to explore Film as a document of Beckett's interrogation of vision, widened to include the eye's technological extension; the camera. I contend that Film is a paradoxical œuvre. Couched behind the camera, it uses vision to blind vision, it employs the eye to undermine the eye. Beckett's double gesture becomes a means of probing the visual obsessions of modernity – the enframings by which being is fashioned into a being-imag(e)ined – and modeling an alternative scopic regime.

AN INTERPRETIVE DIALOGUE: Beckett's "First Love" and Bakhtin's Categories of Meaning

From the very first sentence of "First Love", Beckett's narrator-protagonist engages the reader in an aggressive, one-sided dialogue. We might respond by bringing the voice of the narrator, and Beckett's narrative in general, into contact with the major theorizer of dialogue, Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin's categories of genre suggest that Beckett's story may share strategic affinities with the menippea, while his concept of chronotope helps to clarify some of the contradictory details in the text. It is the idea of dialogue, however, with its implied surrender of power to the other that dominates the text and obsesses the narrator. In illuminating the narrator's resistance to, and regretful acknowledgement of his dialogic position in the worId, Bakhtin's words respond to and renew Beckett's.

Samuel Beckett's For to End Yet Again: A Conflict between "Syntax of Energy" and "Syntax of Weakness"

After Comment c'est (1961) the size and scale of Samuel Beckett's prose writing diminishes considerably. This volte-face in his choice of expressive strategy-from baroque extravagances (How It Is 67) of his middle phase of fiction-writing toward and miniaturization-has drawn considerable attention from critics. Olga Bernal notices a disintegration of since Comment c'est (quoted in Sherzer 49). Raymond Federman characterizes this shift in Beckett's narrative method as delyricalise, to destylise the language of fiction, to designify the words (28). George Lukacs, from his socialist perspective, naturally dismisses Beckett's narrowing and apparently nonreferential scope of writing as an undesirable attenuation of reality.' Steven Connor, however, notes Beckett's later works evincing a new style gravitating toward a calm, calculated, scrupulous, though austere and disconcerting direction (93, 100). H. Porter Abbot argues that Beckett's later works are carefully structured upon radical displacements (224, 228). J. E. Dearlove and Laura Barge agree that Beckett's dramatic stylistic change is actually a logical development of his earlier practices. They sum up this emerging style as being characterized by, among other things, the concept of an integral self being collapsed into an impersonal and omniscient voice, a rigid, mathematical, scientific framework, and fragmentation of consciousness, being, and fiction (Dearlove, Last Image 105; Barge 277). This new direction of minimalist writing was prefigured in the thirteen Texts for Nothing (1950-52) and From an Abandoned Work (1955)