294 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES

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1 294 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

2 Book Reviews 295 rigorous editing process, often purged the sublime. By sculpting the residua, much of the original compound that surrounds his thought whether literary, cultural, historical, or biographical is chipped away to present the bare bones (and a skull or two). The gargantuan task of piecing together a lifetime of correspondence has been well met by the editors of The Letters. Yet, the growth in what S. E. Gontarski terms the grey canon brings to light several pressing questions: how do we make sense of it all? How can a dialogic interaction between the core works and the encompassing fabric both material and immaterial give rise to unique perspectives in this area of literary studies? This is the ground Anthony Uhlmann and his team intend to cover in their collection of essays, Samuel Beckett in Context. It is no mean feat given the vast terrain one needs to cover in order to place anything in context, let alone an author whose literary identity an Irish writer? Or French? English? remains contentious. What ties this collection together is a shared impetus to investigate the broader contexts that Beckett inhabited, frequented, or shunned sometimes all at the same time. Uhlmann, in his Introduction, writes of Beckett s aesthetic strategy of non relation, reminiscent of the mystics via negativa, while asserting that traces of viable contexts of study nevertheless linger and remain. The book is divided into eight sections that span literary time and artistic space, fanning out to include historical and biographical dimensions. The volume begins with Landscapes and Formation, which covers Beckett s formative education and his later autodidactic escapades, and moves towards broader historical perspectives in the sections dedicated to Social and Political Contexts and Milieus and Movements. The three sections that follow map The Humanities [Beckett] Had in the spheres of literature, the arts, and other systems of knowledge and beliefs. The final two sections are dedicated to Language and Form and Reception and Remains. The essays are laid out chronologically where possible, with the intention of instilling somewhat distinct boundaries between the different media Beckett encountered, worked in and moulded. Each chapter presents an overview, in most cases deftly avoiding overlaps across the sections. The outstanding pieces in this collection chart tectonic shifts that shaped Beckett s creative

3 296 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES landscape while delicately handling the nuances of literary milieu, geographical movement and personal motivation. These include essays on the writer s literary waltzes in post-1945 Paris by Shane Weller, his ambivalent relationship with Irish literature by Seán Kennedy, and his philosophical ruminations by Matthew Feldman. Other chapters, such as those by Angela Moorjani, Enoch Brater and Ulrika Maude, shine through in their intricate weavings of material to situate Beckett s oeuvre amid or outside the traditions of French literature, theatrical forms and radio broadcasts, respectively. Notably, the lineup of Beckett critics involved, which also features eminent scholars S. E. Gontarski and John Pilling, draws from a veritable smorgasbord of sources in order to create the various contexts of Beckett s writing. The first two volumes of The Letters are frequently referred to (the third forthcoming at the time), along with biographies of the author by James Knowlson and Deirdre Bair. At this point, I could list the remaining twenty-eight contributors and highlight salient points in each of their chapters, but that would risk turning this review into a product of some dubious mixed choir: one that fills the space but fails to keep in tune. Instead, in keeping with the spirit of interconnectedness inherent in contextual studies, I propose briefly to focus on pivotal relationships between particular essay-pairs. Paul Sheehan and Laura Salisbury, in their separate discussions of Beckett s incursions into modernism and psychology/ psychoanalysis, highlight his literary dexterity and signal the danger in attempts to contain his work within a single theoretical framework. Sheehan, in Modernism: Dublin/Paris/London, discusses the author s late modernism, and attributes the strains of nomadic modernism in Beckett s composition to his transnational mobility in the twenties and thirties. In Psychology, Salisbury carefully sifts through Beckett s pursuit of knowledge on the psyche, which signals a clear interest in examining the topography of the mind (313), and his own psychotherapy with Wilfred Bion, while cautioning against a simplistic translation from occurrence to art. Both essays point to the devastating and ultimately creative impact of Beckett s father s death in 1933, which catalysed a lifelong preoccupation with the nomad (147 8) and neuroses (317 8).

4 Book Reviews 297 Catherine Laws and Matthijs Engelberts dominate the fifth section with their expositions of music and cinema, tracing influences that took root early in the thirties when Beckett was delving into Schopenhauer s vision of music (268) and European cinematic theories (280). Laws and Engelberts convincingly show how the seeds of Beckett s passion for music and film blossomed in the late fifties and sixties, giving form to his work of the period. Their essays touch upon areas that are seldom examined in Beckett studies and point towards critical questions that would benefit from more prolific and sustained scholarship. In Language and Representation, Daniel Katz succinctly illustrates the ebb and flow of Beckett s linguistic stratagems in his oeuvre, depicting a fiction that on the one hand is obsessional in its interest in invalidating the framing of its own utterance and inscription (362) and that on the other applies these stratagems as a calmative (365). A dissolution into wordlessness is mirrored in Mark Nixon s essay, Germany: Circa , which foregrounds Beckett s emulation of the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin in a literature of the unword (107). Nixon paints a vivid picture of Beckett s experience of German culture in the mid-thirties, using pertinent extracts from the author s German Diaries, compiled as six notebooks located at the University of Reading. Significantly, Nixon s chapter depicts how Hölderlin offered the writer an aesthetic that could be set against totalising narratives (100). This publication presents multiple trajectories for approaching the mystery of Beckett s work, which as Uhlmann puts it, paraphrasing Beckett, involves the thing itself constantly eluding any attempt to be portrayed (3). It situates the author within numerous contexts to uncover the interrelations that lie between the writer and his work, and makes for an engaging read for amateur and expert alike. Instead of acting as a limitation, the brevity of each chapter is transformed into a series of broad arcs that bring to light the hidden traces of Beckett s personal encounters. Taken as a whole, this critical orchestration by Uhlmann and his team of three dozen stands as a reminder that the author seldom, if ever, demarcated clear lines to distinguish the traditions that surrounded him. This is not to say that all traces have been effaced. While Beckett s creative ambulations

5 298 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES take his readers to a no-man s land abounding with ambiguity, he nevertheless leaves breadcrumbs, a remainder that never fully finds its way to perfect sublimation. The anticipation of the forthcoming final volume of The Letters, which spans the last three decades of Beckett s correspondence, brings with it an expectation that critical studies locating his literature in ever-new contexts will emerge. Samuel Beckett in Context sets an outstanding precedent and should be viewed as a milestone in the field. Melissa Chia DOI: /jobs