Malone Dies Research Articles

Strange Forms

In Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature, Katarzyna Bartoszyńska studies strange novels from Poland and Ireland to question histories of the novel that emphasize the rise of realism. Instead of thinking about what these novels are—realist or romance, Polish or Irish, fact or fiction—she considers what these novels do. In the process, she offers a compelling formalist analysis of Polish and Irish novels that demonstrates the novel's wide-ranging “capabilities” (12) and advances a new “weak theory” of the novel that focuses on fictionality rather than realism or history (14).This book would be an important contribution to novel studies for the novels it studies alone. Polish and Irish novels are both “minor” forms. They are misplaced within narratives of the novel's linear rise—understood to be peripheral and anomalous. Scholars of Polish literature, Bartoszyńska explains, attribute the Polish novel's strange forms to, on the one hand, the fact that Poland lacked a strong middle-class reading public, and, on the other, to authors' inability to detach themselves from unsettling political turmoil—their inability to be disinterested observers of everyday life. In turn, many studies of nineteenth-century Irish novels often emphasize the importance of realism by focusing on what Irish novels are not: George Eliot's Middlemarch. As a result, these accounts tend to focus on what these novels fail to do rather than what they accomplish—how they depart from more studied novelistic forms rather than how their own distinct forms work. For Bartoszyńska, this emphasis on failure results from an attention to history rather than form; English novels provide the model, while Irish history explains why Irish novels do not produce this model. To study the forms of these peripheral novels—to take what they do seriously—is thus already an important scholarly intervention that deepens our understanding of the novel.But reading Polish and Irish novels together is especially exciting, not only because of the many shared forms Bartoszyńska uncovers, but also because of the experience of reading across different national traditions. Bartoszyńska's deft criticism is humbling, forcing readers to confront what they do not know. Starting on the “anecdotal level,” Bartoszyńska explains the similarities between Poland and Ireland: “both are countries on the peripheries of Europe, largely Catholic, with lengthy histories of political oppression and traditions of exile and immigration” (1). As a scholar of Irish literature I am familiar with this anecdote; it sometimes circulates in footnotes, scholarly asides, or maybe even in response to questions at Irish studies conferences. And yet, by taking this anecdote seriously as a starting place for close reading and careful attention, Bartoszyńska estranges not only the Irish novel but also some of the core assumptions of the field of Irish studies by unsettling the ways in which Irish studies scholars often view Ireland as anomalous and even exceptional. She dramatizes the limits of fields of study and historical periods by refusing their boundaries, pursuing her own path through world literature and literary history.Reading this book not only helped me realize what I miss in knowing so little about Polish literature and not being able to read the Polish language, but it also helped me speculate about all the other things I did not know about novels and world literature. I can imagine that scholars of Polish literature or English literature or world literature would have similar but different experiences of reading this text as their distinct mooring posts become mobile. The book confronts readers with institutionally sanctioned ignorance, but it does so with an eye toward possibility, inspiring attention to less studied forms and surprising relations. Concluding the book by questioning the impulse toward mastery as she proposes a “weak theory” of the novel, Bartoszyńska emphasizes what the experience of reading the book has already taught: there will always be more novels to read, more forms to attend to, more languages to learn, more connections and distinctions to draw. The point, then, is not Bartoszyńska's own masterful readings of novelistic forms—although they are a delight to read—but rather the possibilities such readings open up, the sense that they are just the beginning for new theories of the novel, new accounts of world literature, and new methods of study.The book unfolds by focusing on different novel pairs that elucidate the novel's disparate capacities. Considering Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) and Ignacy Krasicki's The Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom (1776), the first chapter thinks about the forms and politics of utopian fiction while also considering satire, irony, and travel narratives. Explaining the politics of travel narratives in Ireland and Poland—both places tend to appear “as barbaric outposts of civilization”—Bartoszyńska shifts to consider how the form of such narratives travel, that is, how travel narratives operate as models for utopian literature where there is no historical referent for the utopia, only an imagined happily ever after (19). Utopian fiction, like travel narratives, considers “the disjunct between abstraction and lived experience,” she claims (20). Travel narratives attempt to offer the experience of travel but also assert that representations of travel cannot be trusted because they mediate lived experience. In turn, utopian fiction wonders about the politics of travel to a better place: Will the protagonist be content to stay put? Does individual travel lead to collective improvement? Bartoszyńska concludes that these two novels represent a gap between utopian societies and the flawed human subjects that travel to them, demonstrating fiction's capacity to both build better worlds and expose the limits of utopian thinking and abstract reasoning.The next chapter studies world building in Jan Potocki's The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (1804/1810/1847) and Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). Bartoszyńska starts by thinking about the strangeness of these two novels. Neither has a clear plotline: Potocki's novel was published in parts—the first completed edition first appeared in 1847 and was then translated into Polish—while Maturin's gothic novel has tales within tales. But precisely because these novels share this strangeness, Bartoszyńska refuses to read them as outliers and instead argues that they highlight how “our experience of the world is not as a container, or spatial extension, but as a dense network of stories, which are always, at least in part, products of imagination” (41). Representing the supernatural, these novels show the importance of fictionality to building and also experiencing a world.Considering the relationship between painting and prose in Narcyza Żmichowska's The Heathen (1846/1861) and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), chapter 3 proposes a queer formalism. Rather than focusing on biography or sociohistorical context—that is, the identity of these authors or the importance of the Wilde trials to queer literature and history—the chapter claims that these two novels manifest queer desire through the “erotics of their textual construction” (81). What results is an account of novelistic forms and “the longing for form” that exceed the novel (85). In the case of these two novels, this longing for form appears in painting (85). Bartoszyńska claims that the novels consider the relationship between aesthetics and morality as well as the relation between ideal worlds, “an idealized being,” and the constraints of everyday life.The final chapter shifts from strange forms to strange worlds, exploring how Samuel Beckett's trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable) and Witold Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke (1938) enact a modernist undoing of narrative form. Arguing that Ferdydurke and The Unnamable “attempt to find a unique way of expressing the self”—to escape conventional forms—Bartoszyńska concludes that they surrender to “a higher power, that of Form, which governs society” (113). Showing the value of an argument with such transhistorical reach, she offers an especially compelling reading of metaphor and irony in Beckett's novels alongside the Irish bull, a form of speech much discussed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century that combines incompatible thoughts. In the process, she shows how even literary forms defined in relation to place—the “Irish” bull—travel, making the case for the value of formalist analysis because of the surprising relations it uncovers.In the conclusion, Bartoszyńska synthesizes these readings to propose a “weak theory” of the novel as well as a “global formalism” (126). This approach to world literature does not seek out representative novels—one novel need not represent all novels or speak directly to its own historical conditions—but rather shows how the overlooked, the minor, and the strange are just as important to world literature as the exemplary text. The goal is not to be comprehensive—to organize novels and history into typologies, to offer a single account of the novel's evolution, to generalize—but rather to pursue what's interesting. Doing so will not only estrange our understanding of the novel but it will show the importance of strange novelistic forms that expand world literature and formalist theory, according to Bartoszyńska.The smart arguments of this book emerge through an attention to detail and the accumulation of insight gleaned from close reading. A layered sense of the novel's capacities and contradictions, its embrace of and resistance to form, its realism and romance emerges alongside a more focused sense of the connections, but also differences, between Polish and Irish novels. But because of the carefully crafted form of each chapter, I sometimes found myself wondering about the connections between chapters. What is the relationship between the first chapter's discussion of travel and travel narratives and the second's focus on “transport” (60)? Are travel and transport distinct forms or different instantiations of the same form? Similarly, the discussion of abstraction and lived experience throughout the book, after the opening grounding of this contradiction in utopian fiction, made me wonder whether all fiction dabbles in utopic forms or whether the utopic was a dimension of fictionality itself. In the conclusion, Bartoszyńska suggests that fictional texts “engage in efforts to formally model abstract ideas” (127). Is this utopic? Does it mean that the novel's impulse toward abstraction ultimately triumphs over its representation of lived experience? These questions are not problems of the book but rather demonstrate how the echoes between chapters are in themselves productive, prompting questions about fictionality's distinct but related capacities, about the relationship between what fictionality does and fiction's disparate forms, between the worlds fiction builds and the worlds we inhabit.Weak theory, perhaps; but Bartoszyńska takes seriously literature's power not only to be but to do. The experience of reading this book is thus an experience of encountering strange forms not as an end point but as a starting place: as a call to pay attention, read carefully, consider surprising relations, and understand new possibilities.

Greaney, John. The Distance of Irish Modernism: Memory, Narrative, Representation

Influenced by new modernist studies, John Greaney diligently interrogates the simultaneous proximity and distance that Irish modernism has to a national narrative of social and political history, particularly as enabled through form, aesthetics and questions of language and translation. The Distance of Irish Modernism adopts what Greaney calls a ‘flexible formalism’ (p. 26) in order to emphasize the importance of aesthetic features when approaching Irish modernism’s relationship to Irish history. In Chapter 1, Greaney complicates historicist readings of Beckett’s work, specifically Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951) and The Unnameable (1953). He convincingly illustrates the ways in which Beckett deflects ‘the capacities of even basic representation’ (p. 58), as apparent in his engagement with the Holocaust and Irish colonial history, and thereby enables his works to ‘operate at a remove from history to negotiate its trauma and ineffability’ (p. 58). Chapter 2 interrogates the questions of authorship and voice raised by the various pseudonyms of Brian O’Nolan, as well as the subsequent destabilizing forces of fragmentation and trivia located within texts such as At-Swim-Three-Birds (1939). Greaney argues that O’Nolan/O’Brien/na gCopaleen’s texts actively refute being conflated with their cultural and historical contexts. Chapter 3 perhaps best captures the spirit of Greaney’s endeavours. His metacommentary on Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September (1929) highlights that the variability in academic definitions and readings of Bowen’s novels acts to destabilize the text’s relationship with Irish history. In his textual analysis, Greaney argues that Bowen’s representation of Ireland during the War of Independence through the perspective of female Anglo-Irish characters, whose worlds are limited by their class and gender, serves to put distance between the novel and the wider revolutionary context. In Chapter 4, Greaney argues that Kate O’Brien’s application of omniscience is a formal modernist device which functions to distance the narratives of Mary Lavelle (1936), Pray for the Wanderer (1938) and The Land of Spices (1941) from her contemporary social history. Greaney clearly demonstrates how in O’Brien’s work, the setting of postcolonial Ireland is rendered ‘spectral’ (p. 139) by her omniscient narrator, who thus serves to detach O’Brien’s texts from their historical contexts. In his final chapter, Greaney considers the work of John McGahern, a writer usually associated with naturalism and social realism (p. 141), and tests the presumed distinctions between these attributes and modernism. Focusing on a wide range of McGahern’s texts, Greaney argues that McGahern’s critique of mid-century Ireland is informed by a modernist fragmentation of various narrative operations that render reality a ‘hermeneutic enigma’ (p. 165).

Pseudo-Memoirs: Life and Its Imitation in Modern Fiction by Rochelle Tobias

Reviewed by: Pseudo-Memoirs: Life and Its Imitation in Modern Fiction by Rochelle Tobias Samuel Frederick (bio) Rochelle Tobias. Pseudo-Memoirs: Life and Its Imitation in Modern Fiction. U of Nebraska P, 2021. 204 pages. Rochelle Tobias’s bold and brilliant new book is an outlier among recent (and even classic) works on narrative and fictionality. Instead of engaging with the field of narratology (in its classical structuralist or postclassical varieties), Tobias tackles some of the fundamental questions of narrative theory by mobilizing concepts and frameworks from continental philosophy, primarily phenomenology. As a work of narrative theory that largely dispenses with the narratological toolbox of the past few decades (and beyond), the book offers a much-needed recalibration of our critical vocabulary with respect to the problems of fiction and narration. Using Descartes, Husserl, Nietzsche, Lukács, Käte Hamburger, and Blanchot, among others, Tobias manages to cut through the narratological chatter of recent years and return us with renewed vigor and curiosity to key questions about what it means to tell a story. The results are, quite frankly, stunning. This is a remarkable, daring, and truly innovative book that, I hope, will have a lasting impact. Tobias’s starting point is the novel’s principle of verisimilitude, its ability to fashion a semblance of the real world. Theorists from Friedrich von Blanckenburg (eighteenth-century author of the first book-length theory of the novel in German) to Käte Hamburger and Dorrit Cohn (each of whom Tobias references, though Hamburger remains her consistent interlocutor) have located the novel’s ability to craft plausible worlds in its unique capacity to convey the inner lives of persons, to provide access to the otherwise opaque minds of others. Tobias takes this insight and turns it inside out, asking us to think about these minds not as the objects of narration but as the subjects or subjectivities that make fiction possible in the first place. To develop this radical idea Tobias looks to a specific form of first-person fictional narrative she calls the “pseudo-memoir,” which is a work of fiction that claims not to be fiction, but the recollection of a real life. In these works we find the narrator’s telling or composing of his story (all of Tobias’s examples have male narrators, though of course the genre is not limited to this gender) central to the narrative itself, such that indeed this dramatized act of telling (diegesis) becomes the main object of representation (mimesis). Tobias’s main innovation is that she appeals to Husserlian phenomenology to describe this structure, [End Page 1054] stressing that the novel’s realism—its presentation of a plausible world—needs to be understood not as the object of the author’s “intent” but rather as the “intentionality” of consciousness, that is, the very phenomenon constituted by the subject and posited with it as the world in which this subject always already finds itself embedded. Pseudo-memoirs are the ideal fictional forms to demonstrate this hypothesis: they dramatize how a single consciousness constructs another world. Tobias is particularly interested in the double structure of this representation as at once the self-reflexive tale of its own telling and the story of the origins of the individual whose consciousness is the ground of the narrative construct. As such a ground, however, it is a problematic one, because ultimately it is also part of a fiction, invented to produce, as Tobias puts it, “not a narrative of life but the semblance of such a narrative.” This doubling complicates both terms, and indeed the works to which she turns in the book’s four main chapters reveal how the “semblance of life gives way to the life of semblance” in ways that call into question the very narrative frameworks that ostensibly contain these doubly feigned lives. The introduction unravels these ideas and their implications with theoretical sophistication and finesse. A short section on the “transactional” nature of fiction (the credit we invest in the artifice of the text) is a tour de force, Tobias’s close reading of passages from Beckett’s Malone Dies dizzyingly smart and satisfying. In the next section, she explores the epistemological problems...

Reading Performances of Illness Scripts, Clinical Authority, and Narrative Self-Care in Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies and Jérôme Lambert’s Chambre Simple

Malone Dies (1956) by Samuel Beckett and Chambre simple (2018) by Jérôme Lambert present the narratives of precarity in the clinical setting, wherein the clinical caregivers view the suffering of the patients as a spectacle and chart out pre(script)ions and pro(script)ions for them. Both novels open on a note of uncertainty. This paper examines the narratives of fear and anxiety of the institutionalized patients (probably) in the mental asylum in Malone Dies and the public hospital in Chambre simple. The caregivers in both novels represent the voice of medical authority who focus on cure rather than care, providing their patients food and medications or conducting tests. Hence, Malone and le Patient are compelled to develop artistic coping mechanisms of self-care, reclaiming the ownership of the self. In Malone Dies, the abatement of in-person care and the fear of spending time in isolation before death motivates Malone to devise the narratives. Malone is the sole performer and spectator of his performance of patienthood. Similarly, le Patient chooses the position of the spectator, thus turning upside down the “spectacle” of the epilepsy script, where the patient is viewed as the performer of catharsis by the clinical audience. Here, the lens of performance studies helps us understand clinical caregivers’ emphasis on preparing an illness script that governs Malone and le Patient’s script of narrative self-care. We argue that caregivers’ expectations pressurize patients with chronic conditions to implement forms of artistic self-care in clinical settings.

Two Narrative Thrusts: Reading Malone Dies with Bergson and Blanchot

Two Narrative Thrusts:Reading Malone Dies with Bergson and Blanchot Lianghui Li A key feature in Samuel Beckett's prose works is a gesture of negation from the middle period of his creative career. Brian Richardson names it 'denarration', and conceptualizes it as a narrative strategy characterized by an erasure of textual construction.1 In the rising genetic criticism of Beckett in recent years, the form of epanorthosis, meaning 'the rhetorical use of self-correction and word replacement', is extensively explored.2 The gesture of negation interrogates the coherence and rationality of the entire narrative and renders the text 'radically unquotable', as logical anomalies and confusion are conjured.3 Indeed, Beckett, in his German letter to Axel Kaun, advances the concept of 'literature of the unword' ('Literatur des Unworts'), which, as Dirk Van Hulle and Shane Weller put it, 'turns language against itself, in the hope that [. . .] that which lies beyond it may finally be glimpsed'.4 Moreover, the gesture of negation has a bearing on questions concerning the narrator and the entire project as searching for an end. In Malone Dies (1951), many narrative anomalies seem to eliminate the possibility of a narrator, such as the arbitrary naming of the self as Malone, the suspicious act of writing, and the pervasive negation of narration. With the assumption of a narrator undermined, a reading of the novel needs to anatomize the narrating force in order to make sense of narrative contradiction. Arguably, Malone Dies revolves around a central issue of the ending, in that a narrator insists from the beginning that its upcoming death will coincide with the end of its stories. Although the project's feasibility is subject to question, and although the doubt towards it is self-consciously featured throughout the novel, the ultimate goal to make an end does not change. Two features stand out within the ending project. Firstly, there is an emphasis placed on the process leading to the end. Owing to the unpredictability of death, the measuring process obtains as much significance as the end itself. The novel registers a radical exploration of time in procession. This concentration upon the process, as an indivisible state of consciousness in contrast with a perceptible object, is similarly formulated in Henri Bergson's [End Page 221] conceptualization of duration. Secondly, the desire to die a controllable death recalls Maurice Blanchot in terms of both the difference between suicide and the 'ungraspable' death, and the comparable domains of death and writing.5 Taking its cue from Bergson and Blanchot, this article suggests that the novel features two narrative thrusts, namely, the durational narration and a splitting attempt to secure a subjectivity in order to die. Durational narration asserts its temporal significance and its complete inaccessibility, whereas subjective perception derives from the narrative self-reflexivity. If duration as internal time suggests a being predicated solely on the continuous act of narration, it cannot be appropriated by any attempt at consciousness created from within the course of the narration. The bifurcated narration thus problematizes the first-person pronoun in Malone Dies. The 'I' cannot refer to the legitimate narrator in the novel. Likewise, Malone is not the valid name of the 'I'. It is a pseudo-narrator that seeks to claim the durational process of narration in order to consolidate a subjectivity. The proposal of two narrative thrusts also clarifies the paradox of the ending. The impossible task of matching death to the end of storytelling indicates the pseudo-narrator's failure to accommodate the contradictory objectives of self-creation and self-immolation in the process of narration. Introducing time into the study of Malone Dies adds another layer to the complicated relationship between the narrator and the narrated. This layer is exterior to the narrative and concerns the generation of words in its unidirectional progression. In this way, the unstoppable words present duration in a pure sense, whereas the narrative fragmentally represents a pseudo-narration. In turn, the paradoxical split permeating Beckett's works could be reconsidered as the conflict between the limit of a pseudo-narrator and the holistic words that mark duration. Invalid Externality: No Body, No Writing, Not Malone, Not I Of all Beckett's novels...

Ageing in Irish Writing: Strangers to Themselves

This book examines aging in Irish context with a focus on the dynamics of identities and potentials of self-realization in the process of aging. The experience of aging is not merely, as the author points out from the beginning, sociologically “positive-negative polarities” (4), but embodies more complexity and nuance if we explore the issue in literature works, which display diversified individual experiences. This is an important distinction because the aging experience varies with individuality and it is influenced by factors such as gender, education, and culture.The book begins with a comprehensive and excellent introduction that frames the discussion in the fields of sociology and literature. The author has done extensive research and combs through the past studies on the subject that explains the complexity and the challenge of the topic at hand. She begins with a chorological summary of the sociological theories of gerontology that is both succinct and yet featuring polarizing and unbalanced in gender, as the consequence of rich body of work produced by the second wave of feminist movement. The introduction then takes on a survey on literary theories of gerontology, which not only makes aging an eligible category in current literature, but also raises challenge to stereotyped understanding of aging in literature, representatives are derivation of Freud's psychoanalysis and Said's connecting late-stage writing with transcendence. The summary hints the potential of the subject and proves the necessity of redressing sexual balance of the theme.The book confines its examination to the context of Irish literature, which is not a random choice, but a particular social context “providing a bridge between humanistic gerontology … and political forces” (13). The author goes on to suggest that Irish political strategy, demographic research, and media spotlight in the past decades have gradually transferred emphasis from “the third age” (early old age, 50–65) to “the fourth age” (truly old age, 65 and above), to put it in another way, from positive aging to frail aging. These sufficiently conducted background researches in aging in Ireland, once again, have focused our attention on the unique individual experience of aging, meanwhile hinting great potential of probing the subject Irish literature. In spite of the rich body of Irish writings dealing with aging and its full-ranged influence on characters, there is a sheer lack of critical scholarship. Underlining subjectivity and fragility of aging experience, Ingman carefully shows that aging, as a literary theme, has not been fully explored as it is here.Ingman breaks her argument into six substantive chapters. Chapter 2 tackles aging and aesthetics initiated by time, surveying Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Grey (1891), W. B. Yeats's late poetry and Elizabeth Bowen's The Little Girls (1964). Ingman reads this narrative tendency of freezing time with art as exemplary of the aesthetics of aging. The subsequent chapter pursues narration of aging as writers' challenge to this unavoidable route of life. Ingman, on the one hand, proves the reliability of Waxman's genre of Reifungsromane, on the other hand, redresses the gender unbalance with evenly distributed male and female characters, including Molly Keane from Time After Time (1983), Deirdre Madden from Authenticity (2002), and Anne Enright from The Green Road (2015). Chapter 4 discusses conflicts between individual and community in the process of aging. Cases explored here include Iris Murdoch's The Sea, the Sea (1978), John Banville's The Sea (2005), and John McGahern's The Barracks (1963). Juxtaposing solitary aging with socially aging experience, Ingman challenges the feasibility of gerontologists' theory on sustained transcendence. Chapter 5 aims to explore complexity and richness of the theme aging in Irish short stories. Ingman discusses a variety of cases ranging from the interrelations between physical decrepitude and moral degradation (Liam O'Flaherty), psychological confusion of rapid changes (Daniel Corkery), capacity of art in reflecting memory (Michael McLaverty), intergenerational bonds between cosmopolitan daughters and insular mothers (McGahern), to self-confession of demented elders (William Trevor). Chapter 6, “Frail Old Age,” as its title suggests, transfers its angles of view to the old people themselves. Instead of being the glared subject, the age group tells his or her own story and feelings, and pieces discussed here are Norah Hoult's There Were No Windows (1944), Julia O'Faolain's No Country for Young Men (1980), Edna O'Brien's House of Splendid Isolation (1994), and Jennifer Johnston's Foolish Mortals (2007). Ingman observes that despite their unpleasant physical condition and confused mental status, the characters still manage to retain strong sense of individuality. Ingman also notices gender imbalance in such narrations that most first-person narrators are male. The final chapter is an extended study on thanatology in Irish fictions. The author discusses Samuel Beckett's Malone Dies (1951), Iris Murdoch's Bruno's Dream (1969), and John Banville's The Infinities (2009). Ingman points out that the voice of the bedbound and dying is basically ignored in contemporary Western society, therefore, there is a necessity to rebuild a fresh concept of aging, which is not a stigmatization, but an indispensable part of life.Understandably, given the magnitude of the task this book takes up, there are a few infelicities. One is that the focus on “strangers to themselves” in the subtitle is somewhat misleading since the aging symptoms Ingman discussed here are more than dementia; another is lacking of justification of some authors' nationalities, especially Iris Murdoch, who was born in Dublin, but spent most of her life in Oxford and London. Nevertheless, creating such interpretative contexts from scratch makes Ingman's book a significantly important intervention. The book successfully combines multiple dimensions, as Ingman marries her literary discussion on the social phenomenon to sociology and psychological studies. Focusing on aging issue in Ireland, she orchestrates comprehensive and full-fledged literary analysis within strong sociohistoric contextualization. Aging as a theme in Irish literature must now be acknowledged, emphasized, and further explored.

Decomposing the asylum in Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies: Genetic criticism and the author

This article focuses on Samuel Beckett’s use of the asylum in his novel Malone Dies to explore the role of non-textual elements in genetic criticism (the study of a writer’s creative process through the analysis of their compositional manuscripts), as well as the function of the author in genetic analysis. Taking as its starting point Iain Bailey’s challenge to genetic critics to account for the biographical author which underpins the discipline’s study of written traces in authorial manuscripts, the article contends that genetic criticism must be used in tandem with other approaches such as historicism when studying spaces like Beckett’s asylums. Though Beckett took a scholarly approach when integrating such material into earlier work, making research notes which can be regarded as part of the genetic dossier, the asylum in Malone Dies – based on Dublin’s Saint John of God Hospital – leaves no such trail of textual breadcrumbs. Therefore, we must pay particular attention to the historical function of Saint John of God’s in order to understand how the asylum works in composition and reception. In doing so, an author existing beyond the written traces they leave behind can retake their place in a necessarily incomplete empirical field over five decades after Roland Barthes prematurely declared their death.

Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath by James McNaughton, Beckett’s Political Imagination by Emilie Morin

The publication of James McNaughton’s superb Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath hard on the heels of Emile Morin’s equally impressive Beckett’s Political Imagination suggests the delayed confirmation of a political turn (to join so many other “turns”—from the linguistic to the historical and ethical) in Beckett studies. On the one hand, the books could be said to represent an outcome that the field has been waiting for since the mid-1990s and the publication of James Knowlson’s and Anthony Cronin’s major biographies, which helped to better position the life and career of one of the twentieth century’s most important and enigmatic authors in relation to the many upheavals that characterized his times. McNaughton’s and Morin’s recent investigations have also been spurred along by the publication of Beckett’s letters in four volumes beginning a decade ago, as well as Mark Nixon’s work on Beckett’s German diaries, which chronicle the writer’s encounters with the Nazi regime in late 1936 and early 1937. On the other hand, the present studies could also be said to represent a fruition of the broader political turn in the study of modernist writing, which has finally brought this kind of inquiry to an author who has long been considered outside or beyond politics, somehow impervious to the kinds of questions that have defined so much of the New Modernist Studies. To be sure, although Beckett was in some sense the heir, or at least the successor, to Yeats and the literary revivalists in Ireland and a contemporary of engagé intellectuals such as Sartre and Camus in France, his career generally confounds the categories of national literature and “committed” writing. Nonetheless, as McNaughton’s and Morin’s studies demonstrate, to ignore the political implications of his writing is to miss much of what makes it so exceptional and, indeed, continues to make it relevant as both a reckoning with the tumult of the last century and a means of coming to terms with the present, as he is reread and restaged in the context of more recent upheavals.These studies, despite their differences, approach the question of Beckett and politics in ways that are neatly complementary, forming a useful pairing for anyone seeking to better grasp the significance of the question. Morin’s meticulously researched study seeks to provide something akin to a political biography, placing the writer squarely in his historical milieu, at the intersection of innumerable national movements, institutional affiliations, professional commitments, and, perhaps most crucially, personal associations: we are reminded, for instance, of Beckett’s friendship with the memoirist and former IRA commander Ernie O’Malley; his relationship with George Pelorson, a pupil at the École normale supérieure who would later head the Ministry of Youth’s propaganda unit in occupied France; and his support of Jérôme Lindon as the Parisian publisher coordinated protests against French aggression in Algeria. By tracing out these connections, Beckett’s Political Imagination gives us the fullest picture we have of the political environment that has for so long been recognized as a relevant backdrop to his literary career, even if earlier critics have mostly ignored the finer details of the writer’s entanglements with that milieu. What McNaughton’s study does so well is to demonstrate, with a series of adroit close readings, just how these entanglements bear on the form of Beckett’s writing and how the latter confronts, if often obliquely, the historical narratives and ideological imperatives that shaped his surroundings. In doing so, Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath offers us an image of a writer who was not only politically aware, but whose work consistently confronts our failed responses to modernity, whether aesthetic or philosophical, precisely by emphasizing political and historical problems.In recent years, a considerable amount of scholarship, including Morin’s previous book, Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness (2010), and McNaughton’s essays in several venues, has been dedicated to the often vexed relationship between the writer and his homeland. Much work has been done to demonstrate how Beckett’s early writing responds to the competing legacies of Irish nationalism and British imperialism and how his later writing continues to be bound to his memories of his native country, long after he left it for good. If this scholarship has already given us a glimpse of a “political” Beckett, the volumes under review give us a much fuller picture precisely by integrating accounts of his formative years with the longer narrative of how a little-known Irish writer, who suffered innumerable rejections and defeats, eventually became an internationally celebrated figure, credited with providing penetrating insights into the state of humanity after the Holocaust. Seeking out the stories of his friends and associates, Morin gathers together an image of the political culture that surrounded Beckett in Dublin during the 1920s and 1930s, including his involvement not just with O’Malley but with other Irish republicans and socialists, such as Peadar O’Donnell and Charlie Gilmore, who represented political orientations very much at odds with the Unionism that pervaded the Beckett home in suburban Foxrock. Perhaps most revelatory, however, is the detailed work that Morin’s book does to position Beckett’s occasional writings, including “Censorship and the Saorstat” (written 1934, published 1983) and “Recent Irish Poetry” (1934) within cultural debates taking place in the Dáil Éireann (the lower house of the Irish Parliament) and the Dublin popular press during the 1930s, at the same time as his attention to fascism and intolerance on the Continent was awakening.McNaughton’s study takes account of the political situation in the Irish Free State and what we know of Beckett’s youthful psychology in order to discern how his early writings work to dismantle the cynical interpretations that shaped this political milieu. This mode of reading is consistently productive of new insights into these texts, and even develops a nuanced account of the fate of modernism in Ireland, as Beckett negotiates between Irish provincialism and the metropolitan perspectives of France and England. Focusing on “Dante and the Lobster” (1934), the first chapter draws attention to the repeated allusions to sensationalist newspaper accounts of the execution of Henry McCabe, a real-life gardener summarily executed for the alleged murder of his employers in 1926. With these circumstances clearly in view, we can more easily make out how Beckett’s protagonist, the would-be modernist Belacqua, is conditioned by his environment to acquiesce to the intertwining logics of consumer society and the bourgeois state as he anticipates his dinner that evening: “the force of habit,” according to McNaughton, “prepares Belacqua to accept the lobster being boiled alive to satisfy his appetite, and more importantly, to accept McCabe’s execution” (39). It is not possible to do justice to the nuances of McNaughton’s argument here, but suffice it to say that his readings track the various ways that Beckett’s writing calls into question habituated, ideologically laden language that shuts down or deflects effective political engagement. He extends this line of inquiry into the next chapter, on “Echo’s Bones” (written in 1933, published in 2014), by examining how Beckett’s long-unpublished story parodies the language of both Irish and Continental politics, including Yeats’s advocacy for the Protestant Ascendancy and the emerging specter of fascism in Ireland and abroad. The result is a more distinct picture of the young Irish writer as an aspiring cosmopolitan intellectual, who is indifferent to the legacy of Ascendancy and yet skeptical of the promises of the newly founded Irish Free State, as he continues to drift farther and farther from his Irish affiliations: “Provincialism in Beckett’s work,” as McNaughton pithily concludes, “is not an excuse for irresponsibility, but its source; not a lack of modernity, but its fulfilment” (40).In her study, Morin makes clear that this drift away from home was already well underway in the early 1930s, as Beckett undertook the translation of Nancy Cunard’s groundbreaking Negro: An Anthology (1934). As Morin shows in her second chapter, Beckett’s work as a translator of the volume, with its global account of Black struggle and achievement, not only exposed the young man to ways of thinking about race and prejudice that were distant from his upbringing in the Dublin suburbs; it also brought him into contact with the Surrealist’s critique of French colonialism: indeed, according to Morin, Cunard’s anthology was “the first English language publication to give substance to the idea of a Surrealist political front, tied to major internationalist movements for equality and social justice” (118). Although in his study McNaughton rightly points out that Beckett’s correspondence reveals he was not entirely impressed with the contributions to the anthology and was even skeptical about the project as a whole, Morin is able to demonstrate, through attentive readings of the translations, how much care the young writer gave to the work—and even to glean how his evolving understanding of anticolonial politics impacted his translation practices. She is able to draw similar lessons from his efforts as a translator for UNESCO after the war although, as she points out, Beckett was rather ambivalent about the work because “the liberal humanism sponsored by the organization and its internal politics were deeply alien to him” (122). If the account of his translation of Anthology of Mexican Poetry (later known as Mexican Poetry: An Anthology), edited by Octavio Paz, yields some insight into Beckett’s political attitudes in the late 1940s, what is perhaps more valuable in this chapter is the detailed image of his political milieu, in the company of Paz and the likes of Jean-Jacques Mayoux and Emile Delavenay, as they participated in the UNESCO mission with varying degrees of commitment.This attention to Beckett’s efforts as a translator is evidence of the sustained and still growing interest in the so-called grey canon of his work, which also includes the almost innumerable letters, manuscripts, and notebooks that he generated over the course of his long career. As I suggested at the outset, these documents have been crucial in driving the historical and now, more specifically, political turns in Beckett studies, with the present investigations giving particular attention to his German diaries. Morin mines these texts—jotted down as Beckett traveled through the country, visiting museums and galleries, but also witnessing Nazi celebrations, discussing current events, and reading local newspapers—for details that reveal his developing political sensitivities in the face of the Third Reich. Listening to the radio, he transcribed the Völkisch propaganda of Josef Goebbels and Rudolph Hess, as if to better understand its sway over the German people, and found himself at a charity event for the Hitler-Franco alliance, which he coyly protested by performing the Nazi salute with his left arm. But while specifics like these from the diaries remain only anecdotal and suggestive for Morin, they take on the status of something like an interpretive key for McNaughton. This is not to say that the diaries render visible what is occluded or encoded in his literary works, but that they demonstrate a certain kind of political literacy, a sensitivity to ideology, that we can trace into the literary works, as well as a formal response to the versions of German history and the Nazi propaganda that repulsed Beckett during his travels. Close attention to these features of the diaries allows McNaughton to see significant parallels in Watt (written 1942–44, published 1953), which he reads as “a dark parable of the challenges of confronting institutional authority” (61) that reactivates literary form and linguistic experiment in the context of a historical maelstrom. Written during the war but set in Ireland, the novel is both about and not about the Nazi image of history and its warrant for violence: “Watt investigates the strategies that allow one to profit from complacency, valorizing doing nothing, defending the status quo simply because one benefits from it, and rationalizing the past in a manner that exculpates one from addressing injustices in the present” (78). This is a reading, as McNaughton acknowledges, that is all but unavailable without access to the diaries, which enable us to interpret enigmatic scenarios in the novel that the narrative calls into question precisely for what they neglect or omit.It has long been held, as a kind of critical orthodoxy, that Beckett’s writing is intimately related to the ordeal of the Second World War and its aftermath, even if critics have too often failed to specify the precise nature of this relationship, opting instead for vague or universalizing claims that tacitly refuse to acknowledge the force of his political aesthetic. Perhaps the most significant contribution that Morin’s and McNaughton’s studies make is to return to that critical orthodoxy (with the full breadth of the grey canon now available to them) and to seek ways to scrupulously reconsider and rearticulate its unspoken assumptions. The key term for each critic in this reconsideration is “aftermath,” though again they often approach the concept in divergent ways. Morin acknowledges that, for most critics, “Beckett’s writing remains inextricably bound to the aftermath of the Second World War and its traumas” (130), though her account cannot offer much new information about Beckett’s activity during the war, since there is very little extant record of these years. But her research does provide a meticulous portrait of his position in French literary and political life following the liberation: his attitudes toward the fate of collaborationist intellectuals, his place among the contributors to Les temps modernes, his interest in books on the legacy of the war, even his brief stay at the Lutetia Hotel, which had become a site of considerable strategic value for both the Germans and the French in these years. Significantly, in her third chapter on “the politics of testimony,” Morin identifies the integration of contemporary political idioms into his postwar fiction and drama, although most of her attention to this period of intensive composition in the late 1940s is dedicated to the political environment that surrounded Beckett as he wrote his most celebrated works: the mass repatriations after the war, the sanctions against collaborationist intellectuals, the emerging details of the Holocaust. McNaughton’s focus, on the other hand, continually returns to the literary texts in order to demonstrate, for instance, how Malone Dies (1951) negotiates the relationship between writing and bodily suffering, in a chapter that connects Beckett’s daily observations regarding the workings of propaganda and mass coercion in Germany with both the internal movements of his writing and the murderous history of the war years.Both studies converge in their assessment of Beckett’s “Siege in the Room,” and both demonstrate that war testimony is a mode of writing relevant to, even consonant with, his artistic project. In this, they follow, but also try to find a way beyond, Theodor Adorno’s contention that Beckett’s texts were written “in the ashes of Auschwitz” (quoted in Morin, 130) and address the aftermath of the Holocaust in their very refusal to represent directly the events of recent history, even as they abjure ahistorical philosophical abstractions. Calling on a constellation of texts, including “Suite” (1946), Mercier and Camier (written 1946, published 1947), Eleutheria (written 1947, published 1995), Molloy (1951), and The Unnamable (1953), Morin locates Beckett’s postwar writing—its concern with violence, victimization, and internment—in relation to the emergence of a new testimonial literature in France after the war, even if his texts travel along an opposed trajectory. “Beckett’s texts reverse the premise of such literature, rendering history as unintelligible, and the process of telling as burdened by too many demands to enable the articulation of testimony” (131). McNaughton focuses on a particular testimonial, Georges Loustaunau-Lacau’s “Chiens maudits”: Souvenirs d’un rescapé des bagnes hiltériens (1945)—which recounts, among other things, the experience of Beckett’s friend, Alfred Péron, in the Mauthausen concentration camp—in order to demonstrate how The Unnamable intersects with camp literature, especially the ways that their language is both strained by and implicated in the mass atrocities of the Nazi period. The claim here is not, or not just, that Beckett’s writing engages in an epistemological and linguistic inquiry into the failure of representation. Instead, through a masterful reading of the novel’s radically eccentric prose, McNaughton’s approach demonstrates how the narrator’s own inquiry into the failure of representation, including his rapid oscillations between the abstract and the concrete, the corporeal and the performative, are best understood as a response to horrors he can hardly bring himself to face. In this way, put succinctly, “Beckett’s work brings the reader and critics to a place where the ethics of representation are at their most perilous” (108).One regrets that McNaughton did not pursue this thesis into the prose and theater fragments written in the late 1950s, as France became more deeply embroiled in the Algerian War of Independence. To be sure, much less has been written about the role of this conflict, and the controversies that surrounded it, in Beckett’s literary imagination than about the influence of the Second World War on his writing; and Beckett himself, in an era of petitions, appeals, and open letters, expressed a reluctance to weigh in on the matter publicly, because he still saw himself as something of an outsider in France. But Morin, in a chapter that covers the Algerian War, makes an important contribution to our understanding of this context and its bearing on Beckett’s work. She provides a detailed picture of the artistic and intellectual environment in Paris in the late 1950s, populated by ardent dissenters, including Jérôme Lindon and many of his authors at Éditions Minuit, as well as Beckett’s most important collaborators in the theater, Roger Blin and Jean Martin, who both paid a heavy price for their opposition to the war. She also details the many daily reminders of the war that the author would have encountered in Paris, including the view from his new apartment of La Santé prison, where hunger strikes and executions of National Liberation Front activists were a regular occurrence. But perhaps most significant for Beckett’s work was the French use of torture, which became a key factor in growing opposition toward the war. With attention to How It Is (1961) and Rough for Theatre (written in the late 1950s, premiered in 1979), Morin demonstrates that the texts Beckett wrote at the apex of antiwar sentiment contain images of torture that “carry explicit political resonances” (232), even if they cannot be “indexed to a stable context” (236) because these allusions fuse with a range of cultural referents. But, according to this thesis, Beckett’s work is nonetheless capable of shedding light “on the hard face of politics” (249) by persistently probing the dispossession and distress generated by the integration of violence and state power characteristic of modernity.If the contextual details and brief analyses in Morin’s timely study are consistently suggestive of this often-ignored capacity in Beckett’s writing, the conceptual framework and close readings in McNaugton’s valuable book bear out this suggestiveness, offering us a more intricate understanding of how this capacity is actualized in the innovative forms of Beckett’s prose and drama. The final chapter of McNaughton’s study, “‘Prophetic Relish’: Famine Politics in Beckett’s Endgame,” takes a bigger historical leap than the others by connecting Stalinist famine politics and the rise of the Nazi regime in the early 1930s to a play written in the late 1950s, but in doing so it bears out the role of political memory, of aftermath, in Beckett’s writing. According to this reading, the play takes place in a spectral version of the “Lebensraum” (“living room”), imagined by Hitler as a space where the German people could secure the soil needed for their survival and continued security through a racial war. In this way, McNaughton convincingly challenges existential interpretations of the play that read it as an allegory of “time-as-death” by highlighting the historical predicaments of food power and grain hoarding that pervade the entire drama. With this careful reading and those throughout the book, McNaughton largely succeeds in his aim to illuminate the “problem of form” and the “antagonisms of reality” (11) that Adorno evokes in his reading of Beckett, though the philosopher never traces through the textual effects and modes of power invoked in his work. In concert with Morin, then, McNaughton offers us a clearer vision of the political implications of a body of writing that, despite its undeniable importance for the literature of the last century, has mostly eluded the efforts of critics to articulate its precise significance, its full implications, for a world living in the aftermath of the Second World War. But if their books have confirmed the “political turn” in Beckett studies, this is not the end of the road: they open up the possibility of additional fine-grained attention to the political valences of Beckett’s “Siege” writings and to the increasingly abstracted and attenuated writings produced after his Nobel Prize in 1969, writing that still awaits a comprehensive treatment of its political effects.

Grief Lit

Grief Lit Siân Roberts (bio) Vidui David Slavitt Livingston Press https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9781604892314/vidui.aspx 130 Pages; Print, $15.95 In 2018, the British artist Edmund de Waal was tasked with judging a new category for the Hay Literary Festival. The focus of this new prize was a burgeoning genre of literature: writing which focused on the end-of-life, grief, bereavement, and memorial. After spending nine months reading and judging fiction of this nature, de Waal wrote a short essay, titled “Breaking the silence: are we getting better at talking about death?” reflecting on the way that modern life is saturated with death: the news brings us a constant stream of strangers’ deaths and grief memoirs fill our shelves. But despite this heightened exposure to death, he argued that the language of loss remains “so impoverished, so mired in cliche and euphemism, that deep metaphors of ‘passing’ become thinned to nothing, to sentimentality.” In particular, he criticized the way that the language of mourning is frequently reduced to metaphors of “courage,” “being strong,” and finally “losing the battle.” This type of language asks the bereaved to play a certain role and leave no space for emotions other than endurance, resilience or strength. No doubt fiction has played its part in our inability to speak in novel or honest ways about grief and dying. For a theme as old as literature itself, representations of death in fiction are remarkable in their sameness. Fictional deaths are often heroic or symbolic. Where are the cowardly deaths, or the ones marked by confusion or anger? Is it possible to write about death in a non-cliché way? David Slavitt’s Vidui is a rare example of a more original approach to the literature of dying. Vidui is voiced by a man named Vernon who narrates from his deathbed. Vernon tells us from the offset that he is “no longer trying to impress anyone or to be pleasing” and begins a meandering journey through his dying thoughts. There is little in the way of plot and with the exception of a few brief interjections from Slavitt as the author, we stay in Vernon’s consciousness for the entirety of the novel. At first, this intimacy with a dying man’s thoughts might sound like a sombre premise. However, Vidui is far from mournful. Instead, Vernon tells us that “silliness is a way of fending off stillness”: Slavitt’s approach is eccentric, playful, and humorous. A sense of pleasure comes from getting lost in Vernon’s thoughts: his intelligence and imagination are vivacious even as his physical strength fades away. Allusive patterns of thought spiral through every page, as the text jumps from Kermit the frog to Milton all in the space of a few paragraphs. There is also delight in wordplay, puns both mono and bilingual and the strange music words make when they are placed against one and other. This intertextuality and performance of language is not just postmodern play. We are also left with the strong sense it is Vernon’s escape into his mind that allows him to retain a sense of dignity, even as he is infantilized by his unnamed illness. Reading through Vidui leaves the reader with a strange sense of circling further and further away from the real world and into abstraction. This deep sense of introspection has echoes of Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies (1951), another experimental representation of a man’s thoughts on his deathbed. Slavitt tells us that Vidui more directly pays homage to Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), another pensive, metaphysical exploration of a man’s final days. But in opposition to the grief-stricken introspection narrator of Tolstoy’s novel, who ruminates over a life he believes that he has lived and wasted, Slavitt’s speaker prefers to remain on the surface of things, stating that “the brevity of my attention span is a carefully developed defence mechanism, an evasive stratagem that allows me that has served me well. It avoids the unpleasantness and keeps me from dwelling too long anywhere, with anyone, on anything.” And while Ivan Ilyich expresses a deep sense of regret, it...

Is Beckett’s Island Dystopia(n) or not?

The literary genre of dystopia remains popular in the English-speaking world, particularly in young adult fi ction. The word “dystopia” is a nineteenth century English neologism formed upon the logic of Thomas More’s utopia. Dystopia denotes a physical “bad place”, and a metaphysical “negative space”. In Malone Dies the novel’s fi nal scene is happening on an island or “islet”, as Beckett wrote. What unfolds is a scene of horror, a slaughter committed by guardian Lemuel. The islet thus becomes Böcklin’s “Isle of the Dead” (bad place), and Lemuel the boatman Charon who ferried souls to the underworld in Greek mythology. Endgame is set in a post-apocalyptic world, and everything is happening in a kind of bunker-shelter. Outside there is, probably, nothing. Or, maybe, only Death, as Hamm says. Are they situated on an island or not? Are Hamm, Clov, Nagg and Nell the last survivors of an atomic war? A kind of Robinsons, lost on an island in the middle of a desert planet, like the lost boys in Golding’s Lord of the Flies? Beckett wrote some other works that can be considered dystopian, but in my paper I will focus on the two mentioned above, and try to analyze characters in those hostile landscapes, and their useless efforts to avoid the inevitable – the end.

Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy and the Revolution of the Body in Vichy France

This essay explores the depiction of the degenerating male form in Samuel Beckett’s post-World War II trilogy of novels (Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable) in the context of Vichy France’s ideology of the body—specifically the male body—and the propaganda of the regime’s Révolution nationale, which Beckett would have encountered in wartime France. Read with this historical situation in mind, this essay argues that Beckett’s move from the limping Molloy to the bed-bound Malone and finally to the physically limbless figure of The Unnamable gives expression to a reality of physical deterioration that is unique to the degenerating body, a reality that also inverts the ideal of physical perfection that regimes such as Vichy produced. Analyzed in this way, Beckett’s work can be seen to aggravate and challenge both Vichy’s idolization of the strong, athletic male form and the ways in which Vichy and other midcentury ideologies produced narratives of the body steeped in a narrow and ultimately violent essentialism.

Think, Pig! Beckett at the Limit of the Human. Jean-Michel Rabaté. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Pp. v+240.

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewThink, Pig! Beckett at the Limit of the Human. Jean-Michel Rabaté. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Pp. v+240.Maud EllmannMaud EllmannUniversity of Chicago Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMore“Think, Pig!” In Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Pozzo fires this command at Lucky, his tethered slave, who responds with an outburst of logorrhea that reduces Western philosophy to gobbledygook.1 Pozzo’s command raises many of the questions that Jean-Michel Rabaté investigates in this learned and inventive study of Beckett among the philosophers. Thinking, as enshrined in the Cartesian cogito, is usually regarded as the faculty that distinguishes the human from the animal. But what if thinking is a Circean enchantress that turns men into swine? Does thinking humanize the pig or piggify the thinker?Lucky’s peroration actually bears less resemblance to thinking than to vomiting, which is characteristic of Beckett’s work, where utterance is never far from outer-ance, excretion. In any case, to think aloud is something of an oxymoron, given that thinking in silence epitomizes the idea of selfhood as interiority. The thinker is she who, like Hamlet, lays claim to having “that within that passeth show,” to possessing a private and inviolable world of thought. To be forced to speak invokes the specter of torture that haunts Beckett’s work; to be forced to think, however, takes torture to a new horizon, where what is at stake is not the subject’s secrets but the capacity for secrecy itself.Like Lucky, the Unnamable is forced to think—and think aloud—by an unidentifiable torturer. His response to this mysterious injunction is a blizzard of words that blurs the boundary between inside and outside, self and other, human and beast. “I’m in words, made of words, others’ words, what others, the place too, the air, the walls, the floor, the ceiling, all words, the whole world is here with me, I’m the air, the walls, the walled-in one, everything yields, opens, ebbs, flows, like flakes, I’m all these flakes, meeting, mingling, falling asunder.” Yet this assertion is no sooner made than it is contradicted, in a pattern typical of Beckett’s self-negating narratives. If the narrator is “made of words,” he also claims to be “a wordless thing in an empty place,” mute as “a caged beast born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born in a cage and dead in a cage, born and then dead, born in a cage and then dead in a cage.”2These excerpts touch on many of the limits that Beckett’s writing puts in question: the limit between speech and silence, inside and outside, self and other, life and death, human and animal. Rabaté’s book examines how Beckett’s writing interrogates these limits, dismantling the oppositions they hold asunder. In a series of interconnected chapters, some of them previously published as stand-alone essays, Rabaté approaches Beckett’s canon as “a long sonata”3 rather than a chronological progression. Within this sonata, animals feature as a recurrent leitmotif, especially the so-called lower animals, such as the “theological” rats that gobble up the Eucharistic host in Beckett’s Watt (111).4 Mary Bryden’s multiauthored volume Beckett and Animals provides a glimpse of the zoological diversity of Beckett’s oeuvre; in addition to a version of Rabaté’s first chapter, “How to Think Like a Pig,” the collection contains essays on sheep, flies, dogs, horses, and dancing bees.5 Even this inventory does not exhaust the Beckettian menagerie: Rachel Murray, in a witty and perceptive recent article, draws attention to Beckett’s interest in caterpillars, worms, maggots, and the “eternally larval.”6Despite this profusion of fauna, Rabaté resists the current tendency to celebrate Beckett as a forerunner of the “posthuman” turn, arguing that the term posthumanism “usually calls up analyses of subjectless technology, cyborgs, and mutants, or post-Deleuzian organic machines and ‘bodies without organs’” (41). Likewise the notion of “becoming animal,” as advanced by Deleuze and Guattari with an eye to Kafka’s animal fables, misses the point of Beckett’s critique of the human.7 Both darker and funnier than Kafka, Beckett uses lessness and subtraction, rather than metamorphosis, to undermine human grandiosity. Instead of turning into bugs, Beckett’s derelicts are reduced to talking balls, deprived of toes, limbs, genitals, faculties, and senses: “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything,” as Jaques derides old age in As You Like It (2.7.166). The Unnamable laments, “Why should I have a sex, who have no longer a nose? All those things have fallen, all the things that stick out, with my eyes, my hair, without leaving a trace, fallen so far, so deep, that I heard nothing, perhaps are falling still, my hair slowly like soot still, of the fall of my ears heard nothing.”8 How many of the things that stick out can fall away before the speaker ceases to be human? Beckett takes the path of an “unlessenable least”9 to test the limits of the human, rather than the path of metamorphosis that might transform human lack into animal plenitude.“Let’s talk about the ‘human,’” Beckett writes in his first publication in French, which appeared shortly after World War II.This is a word that is being bandied around today with an unrivalled fury. Just like dum-dum bullets.They fall on art communities with a peculiar abundance….The damage is already considerable. With “this is not human”, one has said it all. Throw it to the garbage can.Tomorrow one will require that charcuterie be human. (19)10Translating this passage, Rabaté stresses the double meaning of charcuterie, which could refer either to pork sausages (think pig!) or to mass slaughter, the “boucherie” of “grands massacres”: those murderous episodes in history when the glory of the “human” tends to be trumpeted with dum-dum insistence.11 Like Alain Robbe-Grillet, the leading ideologue of the antihumanist nouveau roman, Beckett repudiates the anthropomorphism endemic to the European novel, detecting “something fraudulent about the word human that is always being flung in our faces.”12 In the French version of Mercier et Camier (1970; written 1946), Beckett captures this fraudulence in the coinage “anthropopseudomorphe,” in which the swollen syllables reflect the ideological inflation of the anthropos (20). Against this inflation Beckett pitches his art of impotence, indigence, and dispossession.In one of his most famous dicta, Beckett declares that “to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living.”13 In Beckett’s view, the artist who sets out to redeem or save us is practicing good housekeeping, not art, which saves nothing, least of all our dignity. According to Rabaté, Beckett’s work is driven by a different kind of ethical imperative, inspired in part by the Flemish philosopher Arnoldus Geulincx (1624–1669), whose doctrine of humility is summed up in his nostrum Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil vales: where you are worth nothing, there you should want nothing. This somber nostrum appealed to the Beckett who claimed that the trilogy arose out of the realization of his own inadequacy: “J’ai conçu Molloy et le suite le jour où j’ai pris conscience de ma bêtise” (I conceived Molloy and the rest the day when I became conscious of my folly/ stupidity/animality).14Beckett therefore opts for “an aerte povera underpinned by an ethics of poverty and alterity” (91), which Rabaté likens to the ethics of the other that Emmanuel Levinas was elaborating in the same period. What is crucial to this ethics is nonrelation—“the face of the other subject reveals first of all an infinite distance” (91)—which destroys the humanist illusion that we are all alike, or that human reciprocity can be taken as a given. Like Levinas, Beckett finds a model for this nonrelation in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27), where the narrator is besotted with the lying, fickle Albertine, not because of her fair to middling looks and intellect, but because of her infinite capacity for otherness (74–75).To promote an ethics of otherness and nonrelation, however, the artist must proceed through the discipline of form. This is because “moral values are not accessible,” as Beckett writes in 1973: “They cannot be defined. To define them one would have to make a value judgement, which is impossible. Paradoxically, it is through form that the artist can find a solution. By giving form to the non-form [l’informe]. Only at this level might there be an underlying affirmation” (167). This conception of form as affirmation gives the lie to the common misconception of Beckett as a nihilist, a pessimist, or an absurdist (143). In Beckett’s view, the artist must not preach, which would defeat the ethical endeavor, but must labor to be beautiful, because aesthetic form cannot be divorced from value.Rabaté takes a prismatic view of Beckett’s oeuvre, rather than pursuing a single line of argument. For this reason, Think, Pig! is hard to summarize without neglecting many sparkling facets of the whole. Several chapters home in on Beckett’s negotiations with the philosophical tradition, especially with Descartes, Kant, and Geulincx, as well as with contemporary theorists like Adorno, Badiou, Bataille, Blanchot, Derrida, Levinas, and Barthes. But Rabaté resists the critical tendency to subsume Beckett’s strange writings into philosophical systems, pointing out that “all the possible theoretical approaches have been applied to his works without capturing what makes the texts tick” (4). Indeed, these works “function as a black hole inviting and swallowing theories” (5). To avoid getting sucked into this black hole, Rabaté invokes Blaise Pascal’s epigram, “Se moquer de la philosophie, c’est vraiment philosopher” (To deride philosophy is to be a true philosopher) (5). Beckett’s art of derision is steeped in the thinkers that he mocks, just as it is steeped in literature and painting, but the originality of his work cannot be explained away by these intertextual and intermedial associations.By invoking these associations, however, Rabaté offers a valuable corrective to the common caricature of Beckett as a lugubrious loner by demonstrating his engagement with the intellectual currents of his day, especially those of his adopted city Paris. Rabaté’s chapter “An Irish Paris Peasant” tracks the stages of Beckett’s assimilation to the city of light, which began with his association with Joyce’s expatriate circle and was resumed in 1937, when Beckett settled in Paris after his travels in London and Germany. This residence lasted until 1942, when Beckett and his partner Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil, who were involved in the Gloria resistance movement, barely escaped arrest by the Gestapo. Forced to go into hiding in Roussillon, Beckett returned to Paris in 1946, where he remained until his death. Yet although he told an acquaintance that “every building, every bench” in Paris held memories for him, he also resisted the idea of “taking root, like a polypus … and living on a kind of mucous [sic] of conformity” (178). Perhaps he agreed with Adorno’s maxim that “ethics today means not being at home in one’s house.”15 Noting that Parisian places, though often named, are never described in Beckett’s work, Rabaté argues that “Beckett’s Paris is above all a literary space in which one catches glimpses of the ghosts of other writers” (179). These include the ghosts of Parisian theorists like Bataille and Blanchot, who haunt Beckett’s writing without usurping it. As Rabaté quips, “If Beckett drops philosophical concepts on almost every page, they function more like booby traps for reference hunters” (97).Martha Nussbaum, in a misreading of Molloy that amounts to vandalism, argues that Beckett’s writing is joyless and empty of value.16 Against this misreading Rabaté argues for the ethical intuition guiding Beckett’s work. But this intuition has nothing to do with the “culture of redemption” denounced by Leo Bersani: a culture in which art is called upon to cure life’s ills, replenish its lacks, absolve its sins, correct its errors, and sublimate its passions.17 Beckett’s antihumanism precludes Band-Aids or consolatory platitudes. What he offers is a fiercer ethics, relished by his fellow playwright Harold Pinter:The farther [Beckett] goes the more good it does me. I don’t want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the shit the more I am grateful to him. He’s not fucking me about, he’s not leading me up any garden path, he’s not slipping me a wink, he’s not flogging me a remedy or a path or a revelation or a basinful of breadcrumbs, he’s not selling me anything I don’t want to buy, he doesn’t give a bollock whether I buy or not, he hasn’t got his hand over his heart. Well, I’ll buy his goods, hook, line and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely. He brings forth a body of beauty (3).18What Nussbaum overlooks is the power of literary form not to transcend the human condition but to acknowledge its piggishness and laugh at it. This discipline of form rejects the bargain basement of solutions, whether moral, sentimental, or cathartic. To laugh, as Beckett teaches us to laugh, is not to overcome our frailty and animality but to find the courage to “go on” in the face of its impossibility: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”19 Notes 1. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (London: Faber, 2006), 42–45.2. Samuel Beckett, Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (London: Calder, 1994), 390.3. Ibid., 32.4. Samuel Beckett, Watt (New York: Grove Press, 1959), 28.5. Mary Bryden, ed., Beckett and Animals (Cambridge University Press, 2013).6. Rachel Murray, “Vermicular Origins: The Creative Evolution of Samuel Beckett’s Worm,” Journal of Literature and Science 9, no. 2 (2016): 19–35; quotation on 19.7. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2003), chap. 10 (232–309).8. Beckett, Unnamable, 307.9. Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho (London: Calder, 1983), 32.10. Samuel Beckett, “La peinture des Van Velde ou le monde et le pantalon,” in Disjecta, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984), 131.11. Ibid.12. Alain Robbe-Grillet, “Nature, Humanism and Tragedy,” New Left Review 1, no. 31 (May–June 1965): 66.13. Beckett, “Three Dialogues,” in Cohn, Disjecta, 145.14. C. J. Ackerley and S. E. Gontarski, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 51 (my translation).15. Theodor Adorno, Minima moralia, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1951/mm/ch01.htm.16. Martha Nussbaum, “Narrative Emotions: Beckett’s Genealogy of Love” (1988), reprinted in Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford University Press, 1990), 286–313.17. Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).18. Harold Pinter, “Beckett,” in Beckett at 60: A Festschrift, ed. W. J. McCormack (London: Calder & Boyars, 1967), 86.19. Beckett, Unnamable, 418. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 117, Number 2November 2019 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/705693HistoryPublished online August 21, 2019 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

How I did not translate Beckett

ABSTRACTConsummately bilingual, during most of his life Samuel Beckett wrote his works in either English or French, and then translated them himself into the other language. His self-translations, however, could be strikingly different in places to the first text, to such an extent that each time the result might arguably be considered a “second original” of the same work. In this article, I explore several possible approaches to translating dual works of this kind (twin-texts), based on my ongoing experience translating Beckett’s Trilogy (Molloy, Malone meurt and L’Innommable, later translated by Beckett as Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable) into Spanish. The question of why merely theoretical, potential or even unfeasible translations might prove to be interesting, if not sometimes preferable to actual translations, is also discussed.

Laying Out the Bones: Death and Dying in the Modern Irish Novel by Bridget English

Reviewed by: Laying Out the Bones: Death and Dying in the Modern Irish Novel by Bridget English Julieann Veronica Ulin (bio) LAYING OUT THE BONES: DEATH AND DYING IN THE MODERN IRISH NOVEL, by Bridget English. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017. x + 236 pp. $60.00 cloth, $29.95 paper. Bridget English’s Laying Out the Bones: Death and Dying in the Modern Irish Novel departs from the postmortem hauntings that populate Irish literature and criticism, the “voices of the dead . . . missing people, unwritten histories, [and] unrealized potential,” to focus on the literary representation of the process of dying itself and the rituals surrounding it in an increasingly secular Ireland (27). English moves beyond Peter Brooks’s interpretation of deathbed scenes in literature as offering “a key moment of summing-up and transmission,” a way of understanding “man’s time-bound-edness, his consciousness of existence within the limits of mortality,”1 to consider Irish literary representations of death particularly “shaped by a cultural and literary experience that includes Roman Catholicism, the Famine years, and the rhetoric of self-sacrifice and martyrdom that characterized its struggle for independence” (4). Laying Out the Bones opens with English’s analysis of Nuala O’Faolain’s unsparing 2008 interview about her impending death from cancer without the consolation of religion, the endpoint of a trajectory English traces from 1922 to 2007 through James Joyce’s Ulysses, Kate O’Brien’s The Ante-Room, Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies, John McGahern’s The Barracks, and Anne Enright’s The Gathering.2 This eighty-five-year period sees the shift from communal practices around death enacted at home to the removal of the sight and site of dying from the domestic space. Given the tremendous social and religious changes that shape death and burial practices in the forty-four years that separate the two final novels in her analysis, one would welcome additional chapters focused on the works in this gap. Laying Out the Bones contributes a timely literary study to the growing body of interdisciplinary work that considers the Irish reputation for “doing death well”3 even as the Irish public and government continue to excavate a past in which so many were denied what English calls “a good death” (3). As the first of English’s selected novels, Ulysses serves as a contrast to the texts that follow; as in the other novels, death “disturb[s] the narrative order” and “disrupts fixed meanings and destabilizes narrative authority” (18). Joyce incorporates the dead throughout the novel to create “imaginative possibilities that are shut down by normative novelistic endings, ensuring that death functions as a point of reinvention or rebirth” (18). Joyce scholars have long considered the central place that death occupies in Ulysses and so will find surprising English’s opening claim in her chapter that “the central importance of death to Joyce’s Ulysses . . . tends to be overlooked by readers and critics who focus instead on the famous ending, with Molly Bloom’s [End Page 481] vitalist affirmation of life summed up in the word ‘Yes’” (23). The chapter would have benefited from a more sustained engagement with criticism focused on the representations of death and funeral practices and their implications for the depiction of ritual as well as language, form, and reinvention in the novel. English demonstrates how Joyce’s resurrection of past characters, his insistence on the textual presence of the physical, decaying, grotesque body, his protean language resisting closure, and his use of death and the afterlife serve to reinvigorate the narrative structure by “bringing the living and the dead into dialogue and submerging his readers in the infinite play of language that mediates between the actualities of lived experience and the meanings endowed upon that experience by death” (23). In astute close readings of “Telemachus” and “Hades,” English argues that Joyce’s design in Ulysses textually resists the meaninglessness implied in Buck Mulligan’s dismissal of the dead as “tripes” (U 1.206) and Bloom’s preference for Paddy Dignam’s corpse with its open orifices sealed up and sanitized to disguise death in an imitation of life (36, 43). In English’s framework, Joyce’s insistence on...

Old Age and Samuel Beckett’s Late Works


 
 
 Old age featured in Samuel Beckett’s plays and novels throughout his literary career. This paper explores the question of how—or indeed if—Beckett’s own experience of aging and old age affected the representation of age in his late works. Focusing upon his last two trilogies, the plays Not I, Footfalls, and Rockaby and the novellas Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho, I argue that Beckett’s late-life literary preoccupations were little affected by the corporeality of his own aging. Even in the last year of his life, he still sought to put down through dramatic images and words the ontological issues that had always concerned him. Hopes that his own old age might lead him closer to the edge—closer to what has been termed “the event horizon of the fourth age,” where subjectivity implodes—were not fulfilled, although arguably he did feel, at times, that he was getting closer to it, stylistically perhaps, if not in substance. To what extent Beckett’s later works serve as examples of a “late style” and to what extent they represent the continuing elaboration of a cultural imaginary of “old age” that he first deployed in his original trilogy, Molloy,Malone Dies, and The Unnameable, are difficult to ascertain. What is clear is that Beckett’s literary old age remained a symbolic imaginary, realized differ- ently than in his earlier work but scarcely more connected with his own later life.
 
 

Irish Cosmopolitanism: Location and Dislocation in James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, and Samuel Beckett by Nels Pearson

Nels Pearson opens Irish Cosmopolitanism with an acknowledgment of the paradox embedded in his title: how can we speak of a particular, national variety of cosmopolitanism when cosmopolitanism makes claims for the affiliation of human beings as an inclusive, transnational community? What makes it possible for Pearson to speak or write of an “Irish Cosmopolitanism” is a series of developments in the discourse on cosmopolitanism dating back to the end of the last century. At that time, commentators in a variety of fields, including many dedicated to postcolonial studies, began to question the simple opposition between “national” and “global” experiences and to assert a more nuanced awareness of the relationship between a familiar homeland and the broader world, between cultural specificities and universal sympathies. Despite its more limited scope, Irish Cosmopolitanism takes its place alongside field-defining studies of literary cosmopolitanism from this period, such as Jessica Berman’s Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community (2001), Rebecca Walkowitz’s Cosmopolitanism Style: Modernism beyond the Nation (2006), and Mariano Siskind’s Cosmopolitan Desires: Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America (2014), which have addressed the transformation in ways of writing about local and global affiliation in the twentieth century. As these books indicate, the transnational turn in the new modernist studies involves an examination of how colonial writers respond to the influence of imperialism around the world and of the role of cultural nationalism in staging anti-imperial resistance. Pearson’s study contributes to another important direction in this transnational turn with his exploration of new models for cosmopolitan community that link local concerns to global contexts.What makes Pearson’s contribution to the study of cosmopolitanism distinctive, of course, is the other term in his title—Irish. James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, along with the somewhat lesser-known Elizabeth Bowen (each of whom commands two chapters in this study), are writers of unquestionable international standing, who spent much of their careers living abroad in a variety of European capitals. They nonetheless retained a certain affiliation, however conflicted or attenuated, with Ireland and its vexed history of colonial occupation, nationalist agitation, hard-won independence, and state building. This is not to say that, before their various departures, their connections with Ireland were somehow stable, that this history was somehow complete, but that their relationships with this history remained always in process, never entirely settled or certain. No doubt this sense of being unsettled is to be found at the source of much of the writing we call modernist, but for Pearson the colonial contexts of Irish modernism are crucially related to how these writers imagine the world beyond those contexts. In other words, Joyce, Bowen, and Beckett share a set of unsettling historical contingencies that bind them together as “Irish.” Neither their life stories nor their creative work comprise linear narratives from national belonging to global affiliation; rather, they demonstrate “a rigorous, nonhierarchical, and mutually transformative interplay of national and global consciousness” (20). Each writes with a cosmopolitan sensibility that simultaneously, not sequentially, pursues some form of local or national belonging and calls on a sense of transnational humanity in an environment that is always contested and contingent. Viewing “expatriate Irish modernism” in this way allows Pearson to harness postcolonial responses to the concept of cosmopolitanism that have questioned its rush to abstract universalism and global unity, while moving beyond postcolonial assessments of Irish modernism that tend to focus intently on contexts of nationalism or anticolonialism at the expense of attention to forms of transnational connection, experience, and consciousness.In this regard, Pearson’s book can be viewed as a response of sorts to Walkowitz’s groundbreaking study, which begins with the question, “What does it mean, today, to be a British novelist, or even an English writer?” (2006, 1). Over the course of six chapters—on Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, and W. G. Sebald—Cosmopolitan Styles demonstrates just how flexible those terms of national affiliation have become after a century that saw the dissolution of the British Empire, the mass migration of former colonial subjects to former imperial capitals, and the ever-increasing mobility of peoples within and between the United Kingdom and the Continent. Nonetheless, Walkowitz retains the term “British” because it serves to bind together a particular tradition of literary modernism, one that spans the twentieth century and a variety of transnational affiliations but participates in the ongoing project of “testing the protocols and boundaries of British culture” (28). The label remains useful precisely because it is contentious, allowing for an analysis of multiple places, languages, and periods suggesting alternative groupings that do not rely on the nation as a concept or category. For Pearson, expatriate Irish modernism presents a similarly useful category because it brings together a body of writing that challenges “presumed opposition between national location and global dislocation, historical rootedness and temporal displacement, the familiar terrain of tradition and the strange new world of the modern” (4). The writers examined in the study, he contends, do not generate a modernism out of some abstracted, ahistorical, or postnationalist form of cosmopolitanism, but from a continuous condition of statelessness that they experience both at home and abroad. In this sense, Irish cosmopolitanism is very much a form of irresolution but one that produces “a rigorously expansive, decolonial and democratic mind, for it involves scrutinizing the dislocations of modernity—alienation, transience, social uprooting, loss—from the standpoint of a preexisting, subnational or presovereign experience of those same kinds of dislocation” (18).That Joyce plays an important role in both studies of cosmopolitanism should be no surprise. Earlier generations of critics and scholars viewed him as a key exemplar of international modernism, whose experiments in literary form had somehow lifted his writing out of the morass of Irish history and placed it on a universal aesthetic plane. Of course Joyce criticism took a decidedly more historicist turn in the 1990s, as scholars began to pay increasing attention to the myriad ways that his writing inflects the social and political conditions of late colonial Ireland. It is the tension between these two perspectives, these two critical traditions, that makes Joyce such an interesting case study for the contemporary scholar of literary cosmopolitanism. Both Walkowitz and Pearson draw on the insights of postcolonial theory and criticism in order to reconsider the national and international dimensions of his writing. But where Walkowitz focuses on Joyce’s critique of British colonialism and Irish nativism, Pearson seeks to move the critical conversation beyond the national and nationalist concern with decolonization in order to examine how Joyce’s brand of modernism participates in new ways of imagining the global. Thus, Walkowitz develops a chapter-long analysis of the “style of triviality” (60) that Joyce employed to contest the social attitudes of “acquiescence” and “cheerful decorum” (59) that both British colonialism and Irish nativism employed to fix Irish culture firmly in place. In chapter one of Irish Cosmopolitanism, on the other hand, Pearson pursues his investigation of the “Paradox of Irish Internationalism”: the seeming contradiction between the development of national culture in the movement toward decolonization and the obstacles this process throws onto the pathway toward international legitimacy and recognition. With attention to the many images of the Irish coastline found in Ulysses, as a site of departure, of transition, of commerce, the chapter makes a compelling argument for understanding the novel as a response to the condition of “being pulled between a potential world society and a contested colony not yet able to be absorbed equally into any imagined global community” (31). Ulysses, then, is a novel not just concerned with resistance to British imperialism but with the broader transnational project of Irish culture. This becomes evident for Pearson in the “Cyclops” episode of the novel, long the focus of postcolonial scholarship due to its repeated allusions to nativism, nationalism, and imperialism. For Walkowitz, the debate between Bloom and his fellow Dubliners in the episode is significant because it is trivial—that is, “it emphasizes vernacular, personal, and economic details, which Joyce uses to disrupt philosophical abstractions both of nationalism and of cosmopolitanism” (2006, 73). But for Pearson the verbal battle is important because it comprises “a layered, self-reflexive revelation of how deeply and pervasively the lack of democratic sovereignty impacts the global identity of the colonized” (29).This line of thought is extended in a number of ways, many of them unexpected, in chapter two, which focuses on the interplay of silence and voice in Joyce’s writing, and especially in Finnegans Wake (1939). In recent years, the novel’s innovative language has increasingly been read as giving voice to the silenced traditions of ancient Ireland, which had succumbed to the forces of British imperialism, and to silenced voices of both the sovereign artist and Irish womanhood. But this is not to say that these voices announce a new cosmopolitan identity. Rather, for Pearson, they are “an expression of the unresolved contradictions” among “gender, nation, and human universals that inhere in the effort to represent a developing, marginalized Ireland on the international stage” (43). This expression amounts to a form of “critical cosmopolitanism” because it refuses the tendency to rush colonial or postcolonial subjects onto the stage of some global multicultural community at the expense of an identity that is still in process, still emerging from its own complex historical circumstances. Again, a comparison with Walkowitz’s perspective is telling. Her notion of “cosmopolitan styles” emphasizes “the salient features of modernist narrative, including wandering consciousness, paratactic syntax, recursive plotting, collage, and portmanteau language” in the development of “a critical cosmopolitanism” (2006, 2) that denies epistemological privilege and heroic notions of progress. Joyce’s attention to the trivial poses a threat to such notions by refusing to separate the paltry and transient from more “serious” concerns about politics and history. Pearson’s focus, on the other hand, falls on “the act of breaking silence” (47) in Joyce’s writing, which he associates with both the effort to transcend narrowly national preoccupations in favor of a liberated national conscience and the possibility of hearing the voices of a subaltern population that has been too long subjugated and ignored. This double movement is for Pearson exemplary of Irish cosmopolitan writing, in its desire to speak for a suppressed or defaced national identity and, at the same time, to address a broader transnational set of concerns and a broader transnational audience of readers.As both Walkowitz and Pearson demonstrate, it is on the level of form, as a register of shared affects and an engine of political critique, that literary cosmopolitanism is most significant—and Irish Cosmopolitanism does much to add to our understanding of how modernist innovations merge with transnational imaginings. Perhaps ironically, this is particularly true in the chapters on Elizabeth Bowen’s writing, which was long overlooked or downplayed in discussions of Irish modernism due to the pervasive sense that her prose was less innovative than that of her male modernist contemporaries. Pearson’s account, however, skillfully teases out the aesthetic novelties in Bowen’s style: “Sentences that are ostensibly meant to move the narrative forward by describing a setting, character, or event,” he shows us, “are also laced with suggestive, oddly weighted words and syntaxes that tease the reader’s mind into more abstract, conceptual registers” (63). This weighting often produces the effect of distorting the representation of time and space, so that the world of the text is destabilized in a manner that belies realism, as well as the subjective time and spatial form often attributed to high modernism. For Pearson, then, the example of Bowen’s style helps to disrupt the accounts of modernist style as an indicator of some mode of universalized cosmopolitan belonging that once dominated critical accounts of international modernism, and especially British modernism. Like Walkowitz, in other words, he identifies a critical capacity in modernist form that works to unsettle our sedimented notions about cosmopolitanism itself; but Pearson finds this capacity in a rather different set of verbal mannerisms, with a rather different array of political implications. For example, in The Last September (1929), a novel set during the Irish War of Independence, he provocatively reads Bowen’s description of an encounter between her protagonists and a gunman in an abandoned mill as “rendered in strangely mixed idiom of elegy and nightmare,” which summons up both Ireland’s waning agricultural economy and its violent decolonizing present. This “disjunctive, but never universally abstracted” manner of approaching time and space, then, is the stylistic correlative to a cosmopolitanism that views Ireland as suspended “between assimilation into the generality of history and irreducible resilience” (76).Bowen’s writing is therefore exemplary of an expatriate Irish modernism that views the notions of home, origin, and belonging as radically contingent and perpetually suspended in a process that resists both fulfillment and nullification. Pearson’s account of her “European novels,” The House in Paris (1935) and Heat of the Day (1948), in chapter four develops this notion of a cosmopolitanism that resists the fixity of national identity, as the dislocated individual makes halting entries into more expansive international or transnational perspectives. In this way, Irish Cosmopolitanism provides an important supplement to readings of The Heat of the Day in recent studies of late or wartime modernism, such as Patrick Deer’s Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire, and Modern British Culture (2009) and Kristine Miller’s British Literature of the Blitz: Fighting the People’s War (2008), which focus on Bowen’s deepening ambivalence about her class privilege and wartime mobility but also about official secrecy and British patriotism. At the same time, Pearson’s study might be accused of underestimating the significance of the rather exceptional circumstances that allowed Bowen to travel unhindered between a devastated London and her familial estate in rural Ireland during the war. Pearson’s reading of the novel highlights the uncertainty shared by Bowen and her protagonist about the status of both familial and national history, as Stella retreats to her Anglo-Irish Ascendancy property in County Cork from the unnerving modernity of the British capital. What this account seems to miss is the further ambivalence in Bowen’s personal history, which surely inflected her cosmopolitanism, her Irish cosmopolitanism: the writer was granted the freedom to move between England and Ireland during the war because she had consented to pass intelligence about the Irish ruling class on to the British Ministry of Information.Pearson’s study perhaps overlooks another opportunity when it moves on to a discussion of status of place and space in Beckett’s writing, without providing a more explicit comparison with what has just been suggested about these categories in Bowen’s novels. Due to their Protestant backgrounds, and despite their obvious privilege, both Dublin-born writers experienced a kind of marginalization as Irish public life was increasingly defined by Catholic and Gaelic interests after independence. But while Bowen developed her own idiosyncratic brand of novelistic realism, which Pearson sees as less committed to the depiction of abstract space and subjective time typical of British modernism, Beckett became well known for his increasingly spare and cartographically indeterminate settings. Acknowledging that this movement toward unnamed spaces has often been read by modernist critics as a movement toward cosmopolitan abstraction or universalism, Pearson again seeks to controvert the received wisdom about expatriate Irish modernism by asserting that this movement is always contingent and never complete. More recent postcolonial readings of Beckett’s aesthetic of unnaming have suggested that it works as a politics of deterritorialization, which renders an imaginative cartography haunted by Irish history even as it opens up those spaces to a sense of estrangement that strains against the bounds of that history. Starting from these insights, Pearson’s argument seeks to move toward new conclusions about Beckett’s cosmopolitanism: his nouvelle “The Calmative” (1955), for instance, deals in both the investigation of abstract philosophical crises and the repetition of halting departures and failed returns that dramatize “the impossibility of negating a place one has yet to understand” (120). According to Pearson, it is precisely this push and pull between the philosophical and the historical around the postcolonial departure that generates Beckett’s unique variety of cosmopolitan modernism, which refuses all forms of familiarity and reconciliation.This distinctive quality of Beckett’s writing, its unnaming of Ireland and the world, serves Pearson’s thesis well. For it demonstrates an idea of world citizenship for those who are perennially displaced from their native land even when they are at home, and who thus “experience separation from home not as an estrangement but as an extension, or broadening out, of an alienation that already exists” (126). The final chapter of Irish Cosmopolitanism, which addresses Beckett’s trilogy of novels written in the late 1940s, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable, explores the pervasive sense of disorientation in these texts brought on by the simultaneous inability of the narrators to comprehend either their home regions or the wider world as a “geo-social abstraction” (125). The novels can thus be read rather convincingly in terms of a “cosmopolitics” that denies the primacy of the ideas about the “human condition” in relation to “inquiries about our identity and belonging relative to place” (140). The crucial tableau here is one that appears as various afterimages in his writing but derives from his own biography: standing somewhere on the coast south of Dublin in 1945, looking out over the Irish sea, Beckett had an epiphany of sorts that led him to strip away what was knowable or recognizable or familiar in his art. This liminal position, on the same stretch of coastline where Ulysses opens, suggests to Pearson “the contradictions of Irish internationalism” (135) that combine “disorientation and estrangement” with “rootedness or provinciality” (134); it also hints at the alternative political geographies and alternative modes of belonging that John Brannigan associates with the coastal and oceanic, as opposed to the national or global, in his recent Archipelagic Modernism (2014). Like Brannigan and Nicholas Allen, who have sought to revise the histories of modernist writing from the North Atlantic archipelago in these terms, Pearson ultimately provides us with a model for understanding the conundrums of the national community and global affiliation that were so generative for expatriate Irish modernists: neither contentedly “Irish” nor serenely “universal,” their writing is “irreducibly situated between these two abstractions” (143). In developing this model, Irish Cosmopolitanism persuasively advances many of the more expansive perspectives of postcolonial studies, without adopting a fully postnational viewpoint, and thus offers an important contribution not just to Irish studies but also to the study of literary cosmopolitanism and modernism more broadly.

LA ESCRITURA DEL DETRITUS EN SAMUEL BECKETT: AL FINAL NO SE HABRÁ DICHO NADA, AÚN

The complexities presented by the exercise of interpretation on Beckett’s work are not due only to questions of philosophical content (i.e. The horizon of Postwar Existentialism), but to his formal approach to language reflection. Namely, words go through a progressive devastation at the core of their significance and connotative reach. This article further explores that process, and the exhaustion of the self as subject in the narrative trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable

Scenes of Writing

Writing as a form of information technology has historically inspired suspicion, mistrust and downright hostility. This essay considers the recent (re)conception of writing as a cognitive artefact, assisting in the mind’s extension into the world. The discussion focuses on two of Beckett’s ‘writing-oriented’ novels, Malone Dies and How It Is, and applies the Extended Mind (EM) thesis to the most revealing and forcible episodes of inscription in each work. Although Beckett abjures the benefits that cognitive extension can bring, reading these two novels in this light can elucidate both the potential applications and the pressure-points of the EM thesis.

Beckett's Vessels and the Animation of Containers

Samuel Beckett's novels and plays are filled with lively vessels: emergent sites of subjectivity that blur the borderline between the human and nonhuman. When Malone Dies is read next to anthropological theories of the homunculus, a protocol of container animation emerges. Vital to this process is Andre Breton's image of the communicating vessels, a visual metaphor Beckett revises in The Unnamable . By adopting material containers as surrogate bodies, or by imagining life in hollow vessels, Beckett's characters encounter a self that exceeds the limits of the body—a form of projective identification that anticipates psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion's theorizing of the container-contained.

All in My Head: Beckett, Schizophrenia and the Self.

This article will explore the representation of certain mental and somatic phenomena in Beckett’s trilogy of novels Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, exploring how his understanding of schizophrenia and psychosis informs his representation of the relationship between mind and body. It will also examine recent phenomenological and philosophical accounts of schizophrenia (Louis Sass, Josef Parnas, Shaun Gallagher) that see the condition as a disorder of selfhood and concentrate in it on the disruption to ipseity, a fundamental and pre-reflective awareness of self that leads to a loss of ‘grip’ (in the term of Merleau-Ponty) on concepts and percepts. Beckett’s writing might, it is argued, make such disruptions more tangible and intelligible. The article will also consider John Campbell’s argument that immunity of the first person to error—Sydney Shoemaker’s foundational philosophical idea that we cannot misspeak the first person pronoun—is revoked in states of psychosis, and relate such states to the moments in Beckett’s writing where this immunity is challenged, and quasi-psychotic experiences represented.