222 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES

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1 BOOK REVIEWS Mark Nixon and Matthew Feldman (eds), The International Reception of Samuel Beckett. London and New York: Continuum, pp. 80; $160. ISBN: Chris Ackerley prefaces the acknowledgements to his essay on Beckett s reception in New Zealand by noting that This kind of review is inevitably a Seurat-like composition of small, blurry dots, erratic recollections that might crystallize with distance into discernible images (126). In the course of my own reading and rereading of this wonderfully informative volume, I realised that, although it follows a country-by-country progression (fifteen chapters covering more than twenty countries) and each contributor seems to have been given a wide berth with respect to his or her particular emphases, the effect of dispersion that results (appropriately in the case of a writer whose reception, initially lukewarm in his native land, took on the character of a diaspora) is countered by a tendency to coalesce around a few central questions to which each contribution implicitly responds. These include: By whom was Beckett especially received (or resisted) within each country? What role did he play in this reception? Which of his works were especially received? When were they received? According to what critical paradigms was his work interpreted? Journal of Beckett Studies 20.2 (2011): Edinburgh University Press Theeditors,Journal of Beckett Studies

2 222 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES In the overview of the specifically national responses to these questions that follows, I have adapted to my own purposes the strategy of the editors, who, in an act of pre-emptive exculpation, remind their readers of Molloy s admonition that if you set out to mention everything you would never be done. One common thread of this volume is, to be sure, the paradox of Beckett s work being both global and, at the same time, highly resistant to assimilation within national boundaries. Wherever it came ashore, it did not fit comfortably with existing cultural assumptions and standards; rather, it decisively altered later developments of the theatrical culture, in particular, of the countries into which it was received. Mary Bryden s comment that Beckett has indeed cracked open any available models of literary expression (51) is especially apposite to this point. The least surprising discovery is that Waiting for Godot is universally known and that it is in certain countries China, for example virtually all that is known of Beckett. Equally unsurprising, the stage plays in general are better known everywhere than the rest of the Beckett oeuvre. Hence, the view of Beckett as a playwright rather than a novelist is a reliably global phenomenon. Related to this, of course, is the availability, or lack thereof, of translations. In many countries, major works, especially the prose fiction, haven t been translated or exist in translations that are badly in need of revision. We notice, too, that Beckett s work was received by quite distinct constituencies, including print journalists, publishers, academic critics, theatrical directors, actors, and writers. Each contributor assesses the relevance of each of these groups in ways that reflect partly the national context itself and partly his or her own preoccupations. The chapter on Beckett s reception in West and East Germany, for example, pays significant attention to each of three waves : the press, academia and cultural studies, and the art scene. The Japanese reception is divided into two separate articles: one by Yoshiki Tajiri on the response of academics and novelists and one by Mariko Hori Tanaka on Beckett s place within contemporary Japanese theatre. Shane Weller s account of the French reception, on the other hand, focuses largely on seminal responses by French philosophers, and S. E. Gontarski s of the American on his personal and professional associations with Barney Rosset and Alan Schneider. Mary Bryden, who focuses a

3 Book Reviews 223 good part of her discussion of Beckett s British reception on Terry Eagleton, makes a persuasive case for the value of his writings on Beckett both on their own terms and as a bridge from the crucial role of Godot in the British reception to evolving responses to Beckett within scholarly criticism (45). Nearly every contributor calls our attention to some watershed event in the history of Beckett s reception. Sometimes these take the form of international academic conferences, such as those held in The Hague, Seville, Madrid, Tokyo, and Sydney as well as the Global Beckett conference held at the University of Southern Denmark. Closely related to this is the establishment of research centres that continue to play an active role in the shaping of this reception. Celebrations of the Beckett centenary are likewise noted, with the one discordant note coming from New Zealand, where the only noteworthy event was the production of a play entitled Waiting for Gateaux (216). We notice, too, the distinction between countries in which Beckett was immediately recognised as a major twentieth-century writer and others in which recognition was delayed by many years. Krapp s Last Tape, for example, was not performed in East Germany until 1986 and Waiting for Godot not until This resistance to Beckett takes a number of interesting country-specific forms. Most readers of this volume will readily guess why, for example, it took so long for Beckett to be welcomed onto mainland China or the iron-curtain countries of Eastern Europe. Less obvious will be the nearly complete absence of an Icelandic reception, which Ulrika Maude attributes not only to the small population of this country (302,000) but also to the desire on the part of nationalistic Icelanders to foster an indigenous literary culture. Another repeated motif has to do with Beckett s reception in certain countries that already had their own native-born major writers. Daniela Caselli mentions that Italians, although they cannot claim ownership of Beckett, proudly point to the importance of Dante (and, to a lesser extent, Leopardi) to his work (211). Curiously, one of the least welcoming countries has, until fairly recently been Ireland, where, as Seán Kennedy points out, it took quite a long time for Beckett to achieve parity with James Joyce and W. B. Yeats (62). Octavian Saiu suggests that Beckett may never achieve equal footing with Eugene Ionesco not

4 224 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES only in Romania but in other Balkan countries, as well partly for reasons of national or regional pride but also because Ionesco s exaggerated characters and allegorical subjects will appeal to Balkan audiences more than Beckett s abstractions and infinite intricacies (262). An interesting variant on the subject of Beckett s reception in countries that already possess towering literary figures of their own is the case of Sweden, where Beckett s engagement with August Strindberg has not been extensively pursued by scholars. This is also true of Norway, whose best-known literary critic in the person of Toril Moi has a good deal to say about James Joyce in her celebrated study of Henrik Ibsen and modernism but nothing about Beckett. Beckett s own role in influencing his international reception is also underlined by several contributors. In his chapter on Beckett s American reception, S. E. Gontarski concludes by suggesting that Beckett was not only a major author and world playwright but a theatrical businessman as well (22). There are, to be sure, other examples that suggest the dampening influence that Beckett and, now, the Beckett Estate exercised on his reception, especially through his refusal to endorse unauthorised departures from his texts and stage directions. Related to this is the curious ambiguity of Beckett s reputation as both a liberating and a stifling force. On the one hand, many contributors stress the role that Beckett played as a kind of hero to groups in various places throughout the world that were fighting repression, whether political or aesthetic. In China, for example, the Great Cultural Revolution begun one year after the Chinese publication of Waiting for Godot led to Beckett s being embraced by dissidents as an act of resistance to the regime. In a similar way, Octavian Saiu describes Godot asaplay whose issues resonate among people who spent almost half a century behind the Iron Curtain (251). At the same time, Beckett has been perceived as an obstruction in his own right, especially by defenders of directorial freedom. This perspective takes an especially amusing turn in certain Eastern European countries where, as Octavian Saiu tells us, directors expect to steal the show and, for this very reason, tend to avoid Beckett. It s perhaps somewhat more sobering to learn from Marek Kedzierski that no major Polish director had mounted a production of a Beckett play until Krystan Lupa did in 2009, and from Mariko

5 Book Reviews 225 Hori Tanaka that the great Japanese theatrical innovator Tadashi Suzuki, although he admired Beckett, has never directed one of his plays (153). Yet another common thread has to do with relative attention paid to the meaning of Beckett s oeuvre and to the formal innovations that it entailed. In this respect, we are not surprised to learn that certain terms existentialism and theater of the absurd, in particular have had a pervasive, and perhaps as well, a pernicious influence. The initial reaction to his television plays in Germany, where He Joe premiered in 1966, for example, focused on the existential aspects already associated with his plays rather than reflecting on the innovations that he had brought to his formal experiments with this new medium. Throughout Eastern Europe, we learn, Beckett s theatre has been constantly perceived as an expression of suffering, much to the detriment of its other qualities, which are too often ignored (259). It is worth remembering, as Marek Kedzierski points out, that critics as different as Georg Lukács, Lucien Goldmann, and Czeslaw Milosz all regarded Beckett s work as merely symptomatic of contemporary decadence and were completely indifferent to the formal qualities of his work. Countering this tendency to reduce Beckett s work to its presumable socio-historical message, there has, of course, been a long line of critics who have championed alternative approaches. Some of them many of them French are well known. Shane Weller cites Blanchot on Beckett s impersonal language (26), Bruno Clément s rhetorical analysis in L Oeuvre sans qualities, and the theories of the philosopher Alain Badiou, which appear to be gaining an audience among Beckett scholars. We also find Didier Anzieu, who has read Beckett in relation to Sigmund Freud s concept of the family romance and, perhaps even more intriguingly, what he describes as Beckett s palindromic art (30). Among the Marxist critics who have resisted a reductive reading of Beckett (Theodor Adorno being the better known example), I found especially interesting the views of the Marxist scholar Franco Fortini, who calls attention to the rhythmic qualities of Beckett s prose, which he praises in terms that echo E. M. Cioran s tribute to Beckett for its resistance to any form of lyrical seductiveness. He also in what I take to be a lapidary

6 226 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES phrase credits Beckett for refusing to abandon affect while remaining the greatest formal innovator alive (216). It is a special pleasure, as I conclude this review, to congratulate both its two editors and its nearly two-dozen contributors for producing what was for them so obviously a labour of love, as evidenced throughout the volume by the sheer quantity and variety of materials that they have gathered together as well as by the fluency of the essays into which they have rendered them. Beckettians from everywhere will as assuredly receive their work with special gratitude as well as with a keener awareness of themselves as members of a global Beckett community. Thomas Cousineau DOI: /jobs An inkling of the terms in which our condition is to be thought again : a review of Russell Smith (ed.), Beckett and Ethics. London and New York: Continuum, pp. 65; $120. ISBN: There is a consensus that despite (or, perhaps, because of) some of the more gruesome moments and pessimistic bleakness, there is a profoundly and deeply satisfying engaged ethical core in Beckett s work, even though he does not fit comfortably among writers with an ethical/political agenda such as John Bunyan, Brecht, Camus, Tolstoy, Dante, or D.H. Lawrence. The humanist view that this ethical dimension results from an existential defiance of the absurd at a conceptual level, and from revulsion against the appalling horrors of the twentieth century at a historical one now seems inadequate. One welcomes, then, a thought provoking collection of essays that addresses the question anew, and with which the editor, Russell Smith, sensibly begins: What is the relationship between Beckett and ethics?, noting that the answer depends, of course, on what you understand by ethics. But, as seems particularly apt for a collection that takes alterity for one of its central themes, it also depends upon what you understand by relationship. Smith s introduction itemises only three of the more prominent versions of what counts as ethics: Aristotelian, Christian, and