Literary Silences in Pascal, Rousseau, and Beckett by Elisabeth Loevlie (review)

836 Reviews and its function. The two approaches are equally valid, serving to show the complexity of the debate. For the undergraduate studying Quebecois cinema for the firsttime, MacKenzie is likely to be more fruitfulthan Marshall, since his work enables analysis of the filmic image in and for itself. There are occasional typographical mistakes. MacKenzie incorrectly spells Le Confessionnal as Le Confessional and Montreal sometimes loses its accent in references to Denys Arcand's Jesus de Montreal. It would be nice to argue that this was part of the debate, proof of the blurring of an image as it crosses over a boundary from one public space to another, from French to English. But it is probably just an unfortunate mistake, along with the incorrect gender and accent ofthe repeated phrase at the heart of Le Confessionnal which MacKenzie gives on page 176: 'Dans le ville ou je suis ne, le passe porte le present . . .'. I have no doubt that these will be corrected when the second edition is published, as I am sure it will be very soon, given the interest that this work is certain to arouse. University of Reading Tony Simons Literary Silences in Pascal, Rousseau, and Beckett. By Elisabeth Loevlie. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2003. vi + 252pp. ?45. ISBN 0-19-926636-0. A recent highbrow cartoon depicted one character reporting to another Beckett's observation that every word was like an unnecessary stain upon the silence. His interlocutor ponders a while before retorting: 'On the other hand, he said it.' This is the conundrum which might be seen to underlie Elizabeth Loevlie's project. Where is the position from which we can verbally theorize silence without dissolving the very focus of our study? Carefully, Loevlie prepares her ground: so carefully,in fact, that a hundred pages elapse before the advertised triad of writers come under scrutiny. This might seem an over-lengthy prelude until one realizes that, rather than being merely the dipping pool, it constitutes an inviting immersion bath. In the course of it, silence is lent various provenances, ranging through pre-symbolic wholeness (language, the symbolic order, will fragment the unitary experience) to post-symbolic stress disorder (language has made a hash of rendering the world apprehensible or comprehensible). Along the way,itmay be allotted positive or negative guises, as prerequisite to knowing God, as haven from noise, or as repression, censorship, or post-Holocaust aporia. What Loevlie seeks, however, is access beyond what she calls the Dream of Silence, a realm parallel to but separate from that of language. Using essays by Steiner and Sontag as stepping-stones to a more specifically literary silence, she uses Blanchot to point to a literary silence which, far from being that which obtains when language ceases, is productive ofa more secure silence, since 'literature's relationship to the raw silence is a constant back and forth,maintained by the movement of literature itself (p. 29). This literary seesawing is a kind of dialogic play which keeps definition, or sayability, at bay, and Loevlie uses Gadamer fruitfully in this particular. Later, Kierkegaard is recruited in pursuit of a dynamic of complex repetition which has the potential to rock to pieces the cradle of meaning, or to suspend it between meanings. Pascal, Rousseau, and Beckett are chosen since their writing embodies, forLoevlie, an engagement with the unsayable or non-symbolic. More specifically, Pascal's Pensees, Rousseau's Reveries, and Beckett's Trilogy are read, respectively, as explorations of a 'non-symbolic God', a 'non-symbolic Self, and a 'non-symbolic "nothing"' (p. 3). The author inserts an 'interlude', via Mallarme and Blanchot, to provide what she feels to be a potentially awkward historical bridge from Rousseau to Beckett. There are one or two missed opportunities in this study. In a somewhat lengthier conclusion, further co-resonances or dissonances between the three writers could have been investigated. MLRy 100.3, 2??5 837 Analysis of Beckett's manuscript notebooks and correspondence, forexample, would have revealed some nuances of his own fascination with both Pensees and Reveries. (One key passage from the Pensees, cited by Loevlie (p. 208), is even copied by Beckett into his 'Whoroscope' notebook, adorned with his...

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