Modern Drama

2006, the centenary of Beckett's birth, was a busy year. The regular stream of conferences and publications devoted to his work has swelled into a flood, and the amount of material generated will no doubt keep publishers, academics, and students amply occupied for a while yet. This outpouring, however, should take no one by surprise; Beckett has always generated more than the usual amount of commentary and criticism, with no sense that his work is in any way exhausted by it. In fact, Beckett criticism is approaching an interesting developmental point: the Beckett archive is being mined, his letters are beginning to appear, and, as S.E. Gontarski notes in the introduction, all of this activity serves to create a series of afterimages through which Beckett's work is being reassessed. The period after Beckett — the turn toward biographically informed criticism, the advent of new critical schools (eco-criticism and genetic criticism are represented here), and the continuing use of Beckett's texts in contemporary French critical thought — does not tend toward the production of a final summary, either of the work itself or of the work's implications. Rather, the afterimages are multiplying, and the trace of Beckett is spreading, through philosophy, through performance, through literature, and through art.

In these circumstances, a collection concerned with the afterimages produced by Beckett's writing is welcome, and especially when the collection is (by and large) as successful as this one. In Gontarski's and Uhlmann's collection, we encounter a range of the traces that Beckett has left: the first being Beckett himself, in a letter written to George Duithuit a few days before the composition of the Three Dialogues. In it, we encounter the argument laid out in the Dialogues — about an art devoid of relation — presented with more hesitancy and self-deprecation; the letter, in other words, retraces the Dialogues. And, as such, it is a useful paradigm for a collection that attempts a number of such retracings, both of Beckett's work in general and of the fine details of particular pieces of writing. Herbert Blau, for example, notes Beckett's traces in the history of American conceptual art; this trace moves across the dividing lines between modernity and post-modernity and across the lines imposed by distinct art forms — a trace of mourning discernible [End Page 290] as a ground bass beneath the practice of modern art. Bruno Clement, in "What the Philosophers Do with Samuel Beckett," discerns the retracing of Beckett's work in the writings of Deleuze, Badiou, and Anzieu, arguing (to my mind convincingly) that Beckett's work is used by all three as raw material for discussions of the nature of subjectivity, which discussions are simultaneously closely reasoned and fundamentally incompatible with one another.

Other contributors write of the traces in Beckett's own work. Stephen Barker makes a strong argument for the trace of Nietzsche's conception of time in Beckett's art, and John Pilling provocatively notes the relative absence of Fritz Mauther's thought in Beckett's work — thus neatly removing a trace which Beckett scholars have been hunting down for decades. C.J. Ackerley discusses what might be called the reversed trace of Max Nordau in the evolution of the related ideas of coenaesthesis and the "Not-I" in Beckett. Anthony Uhlmann contributes a closely argued chapter on the images that Beckett borrowed from philosophy — images which, Uhlmann argues, are as central to the evolution of the Beckettian aesthetic as the artistic images already noted by Knowlson and others.

A third set of contributors deals with the complex matter of the development of the Beckettian trace. S.E. Gontarski addresses the emerging "grey canon" in Beckett's work: the material, ancillary to the artworks, that necessarily transforms our ideas of the art. In particular, he deals with the weight of information now available on Beckett the director and in doing so provides more evidence for those who regard Beckett not only as a significant playwright but as a significant...