Beckett at 100: Revolving It All (review)

Reviewed by: Beckett at 100: Revolving It All Martin Harries Linda Ben-Zvi and Angela Moorjani, eds. Beckett at 100: Revolving It All. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. xiv + 334, illustrated. $29.95 (Pb). Despite recent critical efforts to link Beckett to the local, and most particularly to Ireland, Beckett remains the privileged site of a historicism that is anything but local in its orientation. Indeed, Beckett’s work is at once the site of a painstaking and minutely textured hermeneutic investigation and, paradoxically, the heroic index of a certain universal historicism. Beckett at 100 neither aspires to nor achieves any critical uniformity. The volume contains such useful or tantalizing contributions as James Knowlson’s account of Beckett’s 1937 visit to Bamberg and Würzburg during his German sojourn; Herbert Blau’s autobiographical reading of Blau as Beckett (and Beckett as Blau); Matthijs Engelberts’s consideration of Film in the light of early film theory; Linda Ben-Zvi’s linking of Beckett to Marshall McLuhan (previously published in this journal); and Mary Bryden’s excavation of William Saroyan’s response to Godot. The variety is impossible to synthesize. That said, the volume exemplifies the ways scholars read Beckett’s work at once as a rigorously consistent project and as a privileged response to the ethical crises of mid-twentieth-century history. In her introduction, Ben-Zvi quotes Paul Muldoon, who observed in a lecture that there is no “clear autobahn through Beckett’s works” (7). She claims to agree with Muldoon’s observation, but then plays with his metaphor: some routes earlier traveled are no longer being taken. For example, feminist readings have either run their course or are so self-evident that they need not be pursued. The same goes for studies of the body; to use Beckett’s words, there is “not another crumb of carrion left” (Ill Seen 59), at least concerning descriptions of Beckett’s decrepits. Readings exclusively based on specific poststructuralist thinkers have become rarer as their works become successfully incorporated into broader readings, as illustrated in a number of studies that follow. (7) Despite the absence of the autobahn, evidently, there are, all the same, dead ends. Bibliography, like any further scholarly work along these lines, is apparently extraneous. No note guides the reader to the essential [End Page 410] works that have introduced and, it would seem, exhausted these approaches; the reader should know that, where Beckett is concerned, feminism, studies of the body, and certain kinds of appropriation of post-structuralist thinkers are over. And yet this volume contains an essay on the body in Krapp’s Last Tape by Antonia Rodríguez-Gago and also an essay on Beckett’s ties to Caryl Churchill by one of the most brilliant feminist critics of theatre, Elin Diamond. Further, the volume is very much of its moment in promoting one post-structuralist thinker, Giorgio Agamben, as the thinker par excellence for understanding Beckett’s work. Indeed, it is around the authority of Agamben, and more particularly around the relevance of his Remnants of Auschwitz, that a certain consensus, if by no means unanimity, becomes legible across the different essays collected here: Beckett’s historical importance lies in his unique registering of the predicament of the subject after Auschwitz. David Houston Jones writes, “The radical self-dispossession undergone by the speaker here uncannily anticipates that of the subject in Agamben, so that the underlying discursive structure of Texts for Nothing can be rethought as an oblique and impersonal structure of testimony” (57). Later in the volume, Mariko Hori Tanaka integrates a quotation from Remnants of Auschwitz as descriptive of the situation in which Not I puts its audience, literalizing the idea that the play itself functions as an instrument of torture (251). If Agamben’s understanding of the Holocaust has a historical basis, it’s not clear why Beckett’s description of “radical self-dispossession” should be uncanny or even a matter of anticipation: Beckett and Agamben alike, it would seem, respond to a horrific historical fact. The suggestion that Beckett’s writing can somehow re-enact the experience of the camps is unique to Tanaka’s essay here, but the place...

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