290 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES

Transcription

1 290 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES Scève s dizain CCCXXXI. But despite such fundamental difficulties, and many others besides, SBL is one of the few texts that will prove essential for scholars of Beckett, and modernism more generally, for many years to come. John Bolin DOI: /jobs Catherine Laws, Headaches Among the Overtones: Music in Beckett/Beckett in Music. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. e132, hardback. ISBN: Catherine Laws s Headaches Among the Overtones is an elaborate and admirable tome on the role of music in Samuel Beckett s work. Comprising 508 pages, the book is a comprehensive study presenting a variety of illuminating perspectives on the different ways in which Beckett deploys music in his writing, not only thematically, but also aesthetically and methodologically. Although the multiple references to music in Beckett s writing have not gone unnoticed, until now there has not been a sustained and focused book-length examination of the profound influence of music in Beckett s work. 1 A musician herself, Catherine Laws is a specialised scholar and there are times when her detailed discussions of the role of music in Beckett are a little dense, but these discussions are also the most rewarding ones to read, because it is in these very moments that she presents the most illuminating and revealing analyses of the extent to which Beckett s attention to music parallels his attention to the visual image, to the movements and gestures of the body, and not least, to language. Although Laws herself places her book in the context of word and music studies or Melopoetics (15), the book could be seen to participate in the bourgeoning field of modernist studies that pays attention to the immediacy of sensory experience over and against the mediation of ideas through language. 2 According to Laws, Beckett is stripping away the referential, representational complexities in language, but this should not be taken to mean that music is simply another form of indeterminacy, or the transcendent, ideal other of language (15). Rather, she continues, Beckett dramatises how music can act as a site for the creative

2 Book Reviews 291 reworking of experience: an affective space into which we can project, and perhaps attempt to objectify, hopes, desires, and fears (Laws 15). What music in Beckett means, therefore, is not as important as how it appears to be perceived, and so music does not signify meaning, it merely offers the reader an opportunity to engage creatively with the work in its manner of appearing. The reference to overtones in the title is an important clue to the aim and scope of the book. Laws begins her study with the letter to Alan Schneider in which Beckett explicitly states his unwillingness to address the meaning of his works and disparagingly comments that anyone who wants to have headaches among the overtones is welcome to it, as long as they provide their own aspirin (9). 3 Yet, here as elsewhere, Laws comments, the very play on words provokes further thought about quite what he does mean (9). On the face of it, overtones seems to allude to what is frequently interpreted as Beckett s own jibe at critics who unnecessarily seek to complicate the skeleton simple. 4 [W]ith overtones, Laws explains, Beckett could be seen to imply that critics are superfluous, even unnecessary: they are concerned too little with the notes of his work its concrete experience instead focusing on their surplus, the harmonic detritus that rings on (Laws 9). Still, what any musician knows, and as Beckett was well aware, overtonal frequencies are extremely important: indeed, they determine the quality of the musical sound (9). The reference to overtones, therefore, is not merely a convenient metaphor for the hypertrophic crrritic. Rather, Laws suggests, it epitomises the very stuff of [Beckett s] work (10). Importantly, however, Laws s study does not posit the idea that music is the stuff of Beckett s work. Instead it takes off from the assumption that careful attention to music may uncover this stuff as an unfolding of experience. 5 The vocabulary Laws uses to articulate her ideas is in many ways helpful since the connotations of words like sound, resonance, echo, intensity, transformation, tuning, harmony, melody etc. help concretise and give shape to the notorious confusions, abstractions and ambiguities that permeate Beckett s work. In the early works, Laws explains, Beckett draws directly on ideas of tuning, melody, and harmony; [as] these analogies form part of

3 292 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES an explicit, self-conscious grappling with the direction his writing should take and with the possibilities for literature in the twentieth century (10). However, the role of music in Beckett extends far beyond these early experimental forays (12). Essentially, Laws suggests, Beckett s thinking through music [...] helps him to interrogate fundamental themes: subjectivity and embodiment, authority and agency, representation and mediation (13). While some of these themes may already have been exhaustively discussed in Beckett scholarship, the terminology Laws applies to her discussions, as well as her interdisciplinary stance that is, the resonances, echoes and reverberations that she finds in Beckett s work on all levels and which could be seen to comprise its musical affect clearly help her to accentuate many of the new ways she presents of looking at the same. The book is a bipartite study in which the first five chapters are, on the one hand, dedicated to Beckett s thematic, aesthetic and methodological concern with music and here Laws sometimes verges on reducing every discussion to music and on the other hand, to discussing how music in Beckett offers spectators/listeners the opportunity to engage in the work, that is, to sense its relevance without having to carry this sense all the way to its designated place in the repository of habitual or conventional meanings. For instance, discussing Ghost Trio, Laws explicates how Beckett deploys music to enhance a sense of anticipation and suspension produced by the tonal tensions in a chord based on unusual key relationships (138). This kind of ambiguity, Laws argues, is consistent with the play s textual ambiguity and it is also suggestive of the expansion and proliferation of meanings that is at the heart of Beckett s aesthetic works. The second part, which also comprises five chapters, moves on to address the influence Beckett s work has had on musicians and composers, for instance Morton Feldman and György Kurtág. According to Laws, Beckett s work has prompted a large number of responses from an international array of composers working in a range of styles and genres (21 22). Such responses, Laws suggests, present intertextual echoes that gradually add to our understanding of Beckett s work: The core of the relationship between Beckett and these composers in particular, and Beckett and music in general, is indicative of the broader ongoing

4 Book Reviews 293 preoccupations of late modernism (456). Studying these works helps to contextualise and historicise the aesthetic and social regimes that prompted them, but it also offers unique insights into Beckett s development as a writer. Ultimately, the nuanced manner in which Laws addresses the question of music in Beckett s work is impressive and her keen and attentive ear to the overtones that appear in his work demonstrates how music prompts reflection, not only on what appears to be perceived or heard, but also on the very processes of perception. With Headaches Among the Overtones, Laws makes a relevant contribution to the exploration of non-representational forms of expression, both as part of a modernist aesthetic, and as part of more recent insights into the role of embodied cognition for aesthetic perception. Charlotta Palmstierna Einarsson DOI: /jobs NOTES 1. Although music in Beckett s work, especially in recent years, has generated much scholarly attention and here Laws mentions, among others, Michael Maier, Eric Prieto and Thomas Mansell the output has been mostly in the form of articles. Few books seem to have been dedicated to the subject, with the important exception of Mary Bryden s edited collection Samuel Beckett and Music, Oxford: Clarendon, There is a growing body of scholarship that specifically engages the complex relationship between the kinaesthetic or sensing body, and experience. I will only mention a few books here: Carol Loeb Schloss, Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004; Carrie J. Preston, Modernism s Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011; and Susan Jones, Literature, Modernism and Dance, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, in which there is also a chapter dedicated to Beckett and Choreography. While these books do not address the role of music per se, they comprehend the new physical awareness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as providing one of the most important sources for literary discussion (Jones, 6). The concerns of these studies in many ways seem consistent with Laws s focus on the connection between perception, cognition and music in Beckett s work, and it is generally encouraging that interdisciplinary studies now appear to be gaining ground.

5 294 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES 3. Laws cites the following part of Beckett s letter to Schneider: My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended), made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else. If people want to have headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide their own aspirin in Maurice Harmon (ed.), No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1998, p In a letter to Pamela Mitchell on 18 August 1955, Beckett writes that he is tired of Godot and the countless misunderstandings it seems to provoke. How anything so skeleton simple can be complicated as it has been is beyond me ; qtd. in S. E. Gontarski (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014, p To uncover the stuff of Beckett s writing, Laws seems to suggest, we need to remember what Beckett argued in his essay on Joyce s Work in Progress, later to become Finnegans Wake: Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not to be read or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to (in Ruby Cohn (ed.), Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, London: Calder, 1983, p. 27). Laws s argument is therefore that music not only provides Beckett with a method to explore the processes of writing, it also provokes his audience to engage creatively and imaginatively with the work. Samuel Beckett in Context, ed. Anthony Uhlmann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, xxxiii + 456pp , hardback. ISBN: A plethora of exploratory vistas has opened up in Beckett studies, thanks to the publication of Beckett s private correspondence in the past six years. The four-volume series, The Letters of Samuel Beckett, also gives us good reason to pause and to take stock of the evolution of Beckett criticism. Three volumes of Beckett s correspondence have hitherto been published, representing a substantial selection of the author s correspondence with his peers and intimates. The publication of the letters is especially pertinent, given Beckett s reticence towards interviews; here was a writer who preferred to communicate his creative strategies tête-à-tête or through letters to friends and trusted collaborators. Moreover, much of Beckett s work reflects a strategy that aimed to offer merely the nominal residues of a writing that, through a