Reviewed by: Samuel Beckett and the Terror of Literature by Christopher Langlois Andre Furlani Christopher Langlois, Samuel Beckett and the Terror of Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017, 272 pp. The terror of literature begins with the incipit of The Iliad, "rage" roaring to the epic's last hexameter, with the burial of raging Achilles' mutilated victim Hector. Dactylic depictions of the gods as volatile agents of irrational terror justified, for Plato, the banishment of poets from his ideal republic. Aristotle's rehabilitation of poetry depends on the therapeutic benefits of the terrors of tragedy, where phóbos combines with pity to bring about emotional catharsis. The sublime is meanwhile understood by Longinus as terrifying by definition for, confounding pain with pleasure, it disorients and exceeds representation in a confusion of scales, speeds, and boundaries. Edmund Burke caught the paradox whereby the safety of the aesthetic absorbs the shock of the sublime: "tranquility tinged with terror." Terror, Burke asserts in the year of Händel's death, is the "ruling principle" of the sublime. For Kant, writing eighteen years before Beethoven's fifth symphony, the sublime is a violent outrage to the imagination, a terrifying inundation of murky apprehensions (Auffasungen) into our narrow channels of comprehension (Zusammen-fassung). [End Page 382] The terror of the unrepresentable is, for Kant, cauterized by the supra-sensible faculty of totality, reason (Vernunft) exulting in mental superiority over the terrors of nature. The terror of literature is thus not a nihilistic creed but an aesthetic constant. Samuel Beckett got his Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and Longinus through a classical education at the elite Portora Royal School in Ulster and at Trinity College Dublin, where he himself would eventually lecture on the sublime terrors of Racine before escaping to the Left Bank, where his early French fiction attracted the discerning praise of Maurice Blanchot, who with Artaud equated terror with literature. Already in his first, posthumously published novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Beckett extolled Beethoven's fifth as sublime dissonance overturning ornament and finesse for the exhilarating terrors of illogisme. From Germany in 1937 he sent home a German edition of Kant's collected works that he only parted with more than half a century later. The touchstone of Samuel Beckett and the Terror of Literature is the work of Maurice Blanchot, and one virtue of this superb study is its profound grasp of his relevance not only to Beckett but to critical theory. Beckett all but plagiarized Blanchot in his notorious declaration, in "Three Dialogues," that art has not the means and ends to express but only the obligation to try in vain to do so. Blanchot meanwhile had quickly identified in Beckett's early French novels the implications of Beckett's aspired "Literature of the Unword." Christopher Langlois, who has edited a volume on Blanchot and Modernism, is ideally placed to identify affinities between the two writers, yet Samuel Beckett and the Terror of Literature is much more than an account of influences; indeed the book is little detained by genetic considerations. Instead Langlois sees in Beckett, as in Blanchot, a corrective recognition of the place of terror in literature tout court. His richly sophisticated consideration of terror rescues Beckett's incorrigible work from the nostrums of ethical transcendence that philosophical and political readings continue to arrogate to it, and it chastens the tendency to embed Beckett in the historical and social contexts that his work after expatriation in the late 1930s so insolently abstracts. In his 1937 "German letter," published in 1983 with his consent in Disjecta, where he invoked that Literatur des Unworts, Beckett urged violence against language, a puncturing of the word surface to allow what lurks behind speech, be it something or nothing at all, to seep through. The violence of terror is to be welcomed into language not for its own sake, Langlois insists, but "because it foresees the catastrophe that awaits language where there is no longer any possibility of violence, for this would be the time when violence, which does not cease, has won its victory over all possibility of resistance" (181). In some of Beckett's later work, this dark victory is all but...
Read full abstract
Dec 27, 2024
Anna Debinski 
Open Access
