Beckett and Deleuze, eds. S. E. Wilmer and Audronė Žukauskaitė. Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 55, hardback. ISBN:

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1 138 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES Catherine Laws provides a strong point of closure for this collection, having recently published an ambitious monograph on Beckett and music entitled Headaches Among the Overtones: Music in Beckett/Beckett in Music (2013). Laws breaks with other readings of Nacht und Träume that focus on Christian overtones, arguing instead that the use of music is designed to engender a sense of longing, imagining, and re-imagining of the comforting hands. The strength of this chapter is the musical analysis that points out particularly important features of Schubert s music that Beckett appropriates. Treating the film medium as the harmonizing force for the melody, Laws provides insights on the act of singing to oneself, how this act is deeply entwined with individual subjectivity and memory, and music s ability to carry specificity without character. In total, Beckett and Musicality is an engaging collection and an excellent supplement to a burgeoning field of scholarship that has great potential for facilitating interdisciplinary discourse. The sheer number of contributions is admirable, as are the short chapter lengths that condense often complex findings into manageable scopes. Beyond providing insights on musicality to specific Beckett works, this collection serves as a valuable and inspiring resource for future research on the topic. Michael E. Palmese DOI: /jobs Beckett and Deleuze, eds. S. E. Wilmer and Audronė Žukauskaitė. Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 55, hardback. ISBN: S. E. Gontarski, Creative Involution: Bergson, Beckett, Deleuze. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 70, hardback. ISBN: The relationship between Beckett and the philosophers has provided Beckett scholars with much fertile and contentious ground for study. Among the most contested of these areas is Beckett s connection to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze a philosopher who wrote much about Beckett, but about whom

2 Book Reviews 139 Beckett found nothing to say. As an attempt to bring together the shifting planes of Deleuzian perspectives on Beckett, Deleuze and Beckett, editedbys.e.wilmerandaudronė Žukauskaitė, represents a significant intervention. In the introduction s opening paragraph, the editors make it clear that the two writers feel so germane to one another because both share a certain resistance to codified, homogenising ways of thinking: They both expressed resistance to narrative, language, representation, hierarchy, teleology and closure [...], they both distrusted structures of signification and preferred experimentation to clarity of meaning (1). These introductory remarks raise both the productive potentialities of the study and the methodological difficulties with which the volume struggles throughout. How to coherently study bodies of work which profoundly resist clarity of meaning without committing a certain violence to the work studied; how to evoke the rich skein between two irrationally expressive bodies of work without producing a study itself incoherent? The collection is thus obliged to perform a balancing act with high stakes. Divided into four thematic sections, the collection begins with chapters under the heading Difference, Becoming, Multipicity. The first of these chapters, by Anthony Uhlmann, considers the place of Ideas and the Ideal in Plato s and Deleuze s thinking on matters of art, mimesis, and the divisions that foster the simulacrum. This is a useful analysis of Deleuze s thinking, though the relevance of this lineage to Beckett is not followed through: a brief reading of What Where creeps in for the last two pages, but this only brings a feeling of arbitrariness to the reading as a whole, with Beckett fitting the bill as well as any of Deleuze s other minoritarian writers might. In an aperçu of his fuller study, Gontarski s contribution details some of the lines of flight between Beckett, Deleuze, and Bergson, focusing on how the failures and slippages in empirical reasoning that characterise Watt can be illuminated by the ways in which Bergson and Deleuze recast the central concerns of Cartesianism and Transcendental Idealism. Concluding the section, Žukauskaitė s chapter considers the status of three Deleuzian strategies the deconstruction [...] of subjectivity, virtuality, and becoming-imperceptible (63) in Beckett s work. Of these three, the latter seems to have the strongest

3 140 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES generative potential for further readings, as the idea of becomingimperceptible offers both a theme and a figure of disappearance possessing many suggestive affinities with Beckett s late prose in particular. The second section considers Beckett in the light of Deleuze and Guattari s psychoanalytic and sociological writings. Benjamin Keatinge s chapter uses Deleuze s shifting model of schizophrenia to lead into a Deleuzian schizoanalysis of Beckett s From an Abandoned Work. Next, Isabelle Ost reads Lacanian Desire and Deleuze s idea of the body without organs conceiving of bodies as desiring machines by way of the aesthetics of movement and desire in Beckett s late pieces, especially What is the Word and the television plays such as Quad. The section ends with Timothy S. Murphy, who joins extended readings of Company, The Lost Ones,andQuad to Deleuze s notion of the sociendum in Difference and Repetition. Of the four sections, this is the most coherently organised the chapters all speak to Deleuzian discourses on psychoanalysis in ways that illuminate many facets of Beckett s later writing in particular. Beginning the third section, Space, Time and Memory, David Addyman reintroduces us to Bergsonian spatiality and its lineages in Beckett s and Deleuze s writing. The atomistic landscape Beckett observed in Cézanne s painting when writing to MacGreevy (Beckett, 2009, 222; Wilmer and Žukauskaitė, 144), and Beckett s exchanges on aesthetics with Georges Duthuit, provide the crucial hinge in the argument; by virtue of a Bergsonian strain of thinking, Beckettian space is exposed as a concept resistant to the powers of intellectual understanding, and as something speaking to a deeper, intuitive apprehension. The essay notably includes an important and original consideration of how Duthuit s work on Fauvist painting shaped Beckett s understanding of space. Garin Dowd s essay evocatively considers Deleuze s any-spacewhatever, drawing from it to gloss the loss of world faced by the Beckettian protagonist, with a penetrating reading of the dislocation of space in The Expelled. Colin Gardner s contribution takes a diagrammatic and thematic approach to Atom Egoyan s adaptations of Beckett, raising concerns with performativity, film, and the conceptual relationship between memory and feeling raised when working with Beckett.

4 Book Reviews 141 Taking its cue from Gardner s chapter, the final section looks closely at issues of theatricality and performance. Ruben Borg argues for Beckett and Deleuze as writers preoccupied with closelytied notions of the tragic. While beginning with a remarkably convoluted opening paragraph (culminating with the question can it be that Beckett s writing is Deleuzian because it is mock- Oedipal? ; 193), the argument and essay as a whole is well-crafted, both playful and precise. Daniel Koczy draws from Kierkegaard, through Hans-Thies Lehmann s Debordian meditations on theatre and the spectacular image, to look at how theatre can nurture different modes of perception (209). From Proust to Play and Not I, Beckett is shown working with notions of the image which challenge the mediatization of the spectacular image, offering examples of crystalline description as an alternative. The notion of Beckettian theatricality thus may foster something similar to what Beckett in his 1945 review MacGreevy on Yeats called notations of the image having reference [...] to processes less simple, and less delicious, than these to which the plastic vis is so commonly reduced (Beckett, 1983, 97). Finally, Arka Chattopadhyay s contribution explores the relation between the event, language, and representation in the light of Alain Badiou s responses to Deleuze. Focusing on Godot and Not I, the central argument is a common-sense one, despite the complex philosophical girding. Thus, in Lucky and Pozzo, The tramps simply happen to meet the master and his slave. [...] By subjecting a fixed appointment to the workings of chance and making the absence of the appointment the condition for the chance encounter, Beckett alienates the event from the representational regime and places it into the minor futuristic paradigm of the offstage (232 3). The place of chance in Beckett s plays is well-trodden ground, but it is handled rewardingly, and the attentiveness to the plays themselves fosters more interesting readings than the surrounding Deleuzian debates and terminology. It is partly because of such terminological difficulties that several of the essays struggle to see the wood for the trees. As one example, both Dowd and Chattopadhyay s chapters refer to boring holes in the word surface or linguistic representation (158, 230) but, although these clearly nod to Beckett s oft-cited letter to Axel Kaun (Beckett, 2009, 518), at no point is it actually referenced

5 142 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES or engaged with as a source, and Beckett is barely brought into the conversation. In other words, there are many points where Beckett s writing could have provided a useful gloss or critical perspective, but this possibility was avoided in favour of the Deleuzian perspective. There is also the broader problem of audience. To whom is this volume addressed? An intelligent university student would, I think, struggle to find the thread here: there is a high bar of presumed knowledge placed on the reader in what are very specialised areas of literary and philosophical enquiry. Overall, the volume is at turns insightful and opaque with a little too much of the latter. As editor of the Edinburgh University Press new Other Becketts series, S. E. Gontarski s contribution, Creative Involution: Bergson, Beckett, Deleuze, speaks beyond Beckett to deeper themes in twentieth-century philosophy and Modernism. A collection of closely-knit essays rather than a monograph, parts of the volume serve as an excellent introduction to Henri Bergson in their own right: the opening section is focused, more than anything, on the complex history of Bergson s reception and the place of his philosophy within Anglophone Modernism with useful accounts of his place in Eliot, Hulme, and Woolf s writerly practice. One may wonder where Beckett fits in here, but we do get there, and the lengthy background on Bergsonian thought finds its payoff. Gontarski is keen to emphasise that the volume represents a remapping a symbiotic encounter between Beckett and Modernism, or nomadic lines of flight connecting threads between Beckett s, Bergson s, and Deleuze s thinking (27). As a result, Beckett arrives as a writer whose concerns about time, duration, and representation arrive as shared rather than rarefied strains of thought. Through the Introduction and the first half of the opening section, Anteriors, the focus is on Bergson s interpretation and reception through the American Pragmatists, Dewey and James, and English writers around the Bloomsbury group and the Cambridge Apostles, from Russell to Woolf. It is not until Chapter Four that Gontarski moves into a sustained reading of Beckett s work, and also documents in detail Beckett s early reading of Bergson. Gontarski makes a compelling biographical case for the

6 Book Reviews 143 lasting influence of A. A. Luce, Beckett s tutor at Trinity College Dublin, over Beckett s interest in Berkeley and Bergson. Indeed, this reading suggests other lineages would be worthy of similar exploration particularly the place of Bergsonism in the thinking of Beckett s later companions and confidants, such as Georges Duthuit. With the following section, Interiors, Deleuze becomes a vocal participant in the discussion. It is through Deleuze and Guattari s A Thousand Plateaus that the idea of involution is worked through alongside deterritorialization in Beckett s aesthetic. Involution provides an interesting metaphor for thinking about the relation between texts in terms of becoming and differentiation, as opposed to the linear alternatives offered by a progressive evolution or regressive devolution. Although Watt and The Unnamable occupy much of Gontarski s attention in the first half of the volume, the final chapters shift gear and tone. Using Bergson s ideas about memory-images alongside theories from cognitive science, before moving onto the Deleuzian concept of deterritorialization, Gontarski fosters several germane connecting points between Beckett s critical concerns in essays such as Proust, the theatrical space in plays such as Endgame, and the sparse closed spaces of texts such as Imagination Dead Imagine and La Falaise. The very final section, Posteriors, turns to consider William Burroughs alongside Beckett s travails on Film. This feels superfluous, perhaps. Burroughs provides a neat anecdotal instance of the disappearing author, and Gontarski draws on Deleuze and Beckett as advocating a focus on the preservation of the artwork and the disappearance of the author (Gontarski, 2015, 183). For all that though, the conclusion allows the biographical to overtake textual engagement, in contrast to the book as a whole. Despite framing the volume as a Bergsonian-Deleuzian reading of Beckett, what Gontarski has produced is really a highly suggestive collection of essays that reappraises common concerns shared by the three authors from multiple perspectives, doggedly illuminating its subjects from new angles. Consequently, Beckett, Bergson, and Deleuze all come into view as writers emblematic of wider preoccupations in twentieth-century literature, art, and philosophy. This is a wide-ranging account of significant interest

7 144 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES beyond Beckett Studies. One wonders what other Becketts lurk behind the surface. Tim Lawrence DOI: /jobs WORKS CITED Beckett, Samuel (1983), Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn, London: Calder. Beckett, Samuel (2009), The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. I: , eds. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Iain Bailey, Beckett and the Bible. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 54, hardback. ISBN: Iain Bailey s important monograph radically revises assumptions of influence and value in Beckett s biblical appropriations, engaging in a sustained study of intertextuality and the various operations of citation, allusion, and elision in Beckett s texts. It seems fitting, then, to begin at one of its paratextual boundaries and work inwards. In his back-cover endorsement of Beckett and the Bible, Dirk Van Hulle discerns how Bailey rethinks biblical reference in Beckett s published texts, manuscripts, letters and transcribed conversations. Beckett s interrogation of the terrible materiality of the word surface takes on added valency and nuance when applied to deeply familiar and often deeply submerged scriptural citation in his texts. Van Hulle identifies a key virtue of Bailey s study in posing an approach to intertextuality that does not limit itself to phrase-hunting [...] but that consists in a subtle negotiation between texts and contexts, moving across the published works as well as the grey canon. This evaluation is spoton, and worth pondering in some depth. Bailey explicitly makes a case beyond identifying specific points of biblical reference (or partreference) in Beckett s texts and notebooks, exploring histories of familiarity, common knowledge, education, nation and family in which Beckett and the Bible are both involved (11). Beckett and