‘Like a sweat of things’: familiarity, intertextuality, and Beckett's Bibles
2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 28; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/0950236x.2013.875483
ISSN1470-1308
Autores Tópico(s)Kierkegaardian Philosophy and Influence
ResumoAbstractSamuel Beckett's work is persistently concerned with language coming from somewhere else, and among the most sustained critical discourses around it are those that take an interest in its sources, influences, and appropriations. This essay aims to show that a notion of familiarity is either tacitly or explicitly fundamental to many of these discourses, and argues that familiarity is a crucial problem for any critical practice wanting to negotiate ideas of intertextuality. Familiarity is a problem insofar as it runs between demonstrability and non-demonstrability, and between a more-or-less undifferentiated abstract totality and discrete units of language. These are oppositions that Beckett's writing dramatises in its relation to other texts, both in the published work and in the archives. They are also brought out especially clearly in the case of the Bible, which has tended to be regarded as the most familiar of quantities for Beckett. Centred on Malone Dies, the essay offers a reading of the ways in which language and possession are worked over as mutual problems in Beckett's writing, while at the same time looking to account for the sense in which it displays – according to a note by Adorno on The Unnamable – ‘something like sound common sense’.Keywords: Samuel BeckettintertextualityarchiveMalone DiesBibleJulia KristevaPierre Bourdieutreatment of familiarity Notes1 Anne Atik, How It Was: A Memoir of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber, 2001), p. 122.2 Close studies of these interactions can be found, in turn, in Matthew Feldman, Beckett's Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett's ‘Interwar Notes’ (London: Continuum, 2006); David Tucker, Samuel Beckett and Arnold Geulincx: Tracing ‘A Literary Fantasia’ (London: Continuum, 2012); Francis Doherty, ‘Mahaffy's Whoroscope’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 2.1 (Autumn, 1992), pp. 27–46.3 Roger Chartier, ‘Laborers and Voyagers: From the Text to the Reader’, trans. J. A. González, Diacritics, 22.2 (Summer, 1992), pp. 49–61 (56). Chartier works through three oppositions between modes of reading that he takes to be familiar: silent and vocalised; intensive and extensive; and solitary and collective.4 For Kant, see John Pilling, ‘A Critique of Aesthetic Judgment: Beckett's “Dissonance of Ends and Means”’, in S. E. Gontarski (ed.), A Companion to Samuel Beckett (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 63–72. For Wittgenstein, see Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon, Samuel Beckett's Library (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 163–167. For Garnier, see John Pilling (ed.), Beckett's Dream Notebook (Reading: Beckett International Foundation, 1999), pp. 59–69.5 Shane Weller, ‘Foreword’, in Feldman (ed.), Beckett's Books, pp. viii–ix.6 S. E. Gontarski, ‘Beckett's papers, foul and fair’, in S. E. Gontarski (ed.), The Beckett Critical Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), pp. 1–14(11).7 Jerome McGann, ‘Philology in a New Key’, Critical Inquiry, 39.2 (2013), pp. 327–346 (339).8 S. E. Gontarski, ‘Introduction’, in A Companion to Samuel Beckett, pp. 1–10 (3).9 Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (London: Cape, 1978), pp. 18–19.10 First quoted in Duckworth's introduction to his edition of En attendant Godot. Samuel Beckett, En attendant Godot, Colin Duckworth (ed.) (London: Harrap-Nelson, 1966), p. xlvi.11 Van Hulle and Nixon, Beckett's Library, pp. 174, 177–178. Hereafter abbreviated as BL and cited parenthetically by page number.12 Richard Dawkins, interview, http://www.kingjamesbibletrust.org/news/2010/02/19/richard-dawkins-lends-his-support-to-the-king-james-bible-trust, accessed 15.03.11.13 Tom Sutcliffe, ‘The Weekend's TV’, Independent (14 Feb 2011).14 Chartier, ‘Laborers and Voyagers’, p. 54.15 Ibid., p. 57. See also Roger Chartier, Culture écrite et société: L'ordre des livres (XIVe–XVIIIe siècle) (Paris: Albin Michel, 1996), pp. 33–35 (34), where he makes a similar point about the Bible and intensive reading, but also outlines the differences brought about by the development of the Bible in conjunction with the codex: the possibility for pagination, and so for indexes and concordances enabling an easier ‘manipulation’ of the text, and more specifically the ‘mobilisation [ … ] of citations from Holy Scripture [Parole sacrée]’.16 Ruby Cohn, Just Play: Beckett's Theater (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 143.17 Rosemary Pountney, ‘Review of Mary Bryden', Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998)’, The Review of English Studies, n.s., 50.199 (1999), pp. 412–414 (412).18 Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity, 1992), p. 26. Hereafter abbreviated as LP and cited parenthetically.19 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, trans. Richard Nice (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 56. Hereafter abbreviated as D and cited parenthetically.20 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 73.21 Jonathan Culler, ‘Presupposition and Intertextuality’, MLN, 91 (1976), pp. 1380–1396 (1381).22 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 59–60.23 One version of intertextuality in La Révolution du langage poétique is ‘presupposed context’, which appears in section B of the French text (not included in the English translation, Revolution in Poetic Language). Culler's sense of presupposition appears to take its lead from here. Kristeva refers explicitly to ‘generalised presupposition’ as an ‘economy’; she goes on to write: ‘We are faced here with a general economy proper to [propre à] certain discursive acts’. Julia Kristeva, La Révolution du langage poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1974), pp. 337–338; translation mine.24 Kristeva, La Révolution du langage poétique, pp. 343–349. Culler also observes this alternation in Kristeva's practice. Culler, ‘Presupposition and Intertextuality’, pp. 1384–1385.25 Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 60.26 For a critical reading of Kristeva along these lines, see Jacqueline Rose, ‘Julia Kristeva – Take Two’, in Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986), pp. 141–164.27 I treat these relations between Beckett and the Bible more extensively in my book, Samuel Beckett and the Bible (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).28 Samuel Beckett, Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnamable (London: John Calder, 2003 [1959]), p. 209. Hereafter abbreviated as T and cited parenthetically.29 Samuel Beckett, ‘Preface’, in Peter Boxall (ed.), Malone Dies(London: Faber, 2010), pp. xi–xii.30 In his transcribed edition of Beckett's Dream notebook, for instance, John Pilling observes that ‘in writing Malone Dies more than a decade later Beckett had good reason to remember what he had tried to put behind him’, that is, the habit of note-taking represented by the Dream book. Pilling, Beckett's Dream Notebook, p. xi.31 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Notes on Beckett’, trans. Dirk Van Hulle and Shane Weller, Journal of Beckett Studies, 19.2 (2010), pp. 157–187 (175).32 Laura Salisbury, Samuel Beckett: Comic Timing, Laughing Matters (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), pp. 78–81 and passim.33 As, for example: ‘Terrors shall make him afraid on every side’ (Job 18.11); ‘the little hills rejoice on every side’ (Psalm 65.12); ‘Fear is on every side’ (Jeremiah 49.29); ‘give to every man according to his ways’ (1 Kings 8.39); ‘Answer a fool according to his folly’ (Proverbs 26.5); and ‘Who will render to every man according to his deeds’ (Romans 2.6).34 Salisbury, Comic Timing, p. 81.35 Beckett is cited alongside Claude Simon as Éditions de Minuit authors whose Nobel Prizes have tended to ‘consecrate’ the institution. Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, trans. Susan Emanuel (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), p. 370, n. 6.36 The two terms appear, respectively, in Beckett's letters to Thomas MacGreevy of 25 January 1931 and [early] August 1931. See Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck (ed.), The Letters of Samuel Beckett, I, 1929–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 62; and Pilling, Beckett's Dream Notebook, p. xiii.37 Pilling, Beckett's Dream Notebook, p. 35.38 Ibid.39 Samuel Beckett, The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett: A Critical Edition, Seán Lawlor and John Pilling (ed.) (London: Faber, 2012), p. 57.40 Personal correspondence with Dr Máire Kennedy, Dublin and Irish Collections librarian for Dublin City Libraries, who acquired the book.41 Samuel Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber, 1990), p. 13.42 Salisbury, Comic Timing, p. 94.43 The important context for this sense of joking is Freud. Salisbury treats this relation between humour and mastery, and situates it in relation to ethical readings of Beckett. Salisbury, Comic Timing, pp. 28–30, 94–95.44 For a direct response to the relationship between intertextuality and mastery in Beckett studies, see Daniela Caselli's introductory essay in Daniela Caselli (ed.), Beckett and Nothing: Trying to Understand Beckett (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), pp. 1–19 (9–13). For the problem of mastery in relation to ethical readings, see Shane Weller, ‘Beckett and Ethics’, in Gontarski (ed.), A Companion to Samuel Beckett, pp. 118–29.45 Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London: John Calder, 1999), pp. 101–102.46 Samuel Beckett, Murphy, J.C.C. Mays (ed.) (London: Faber, 2009), p. 11.47 In the preliminaries to his article listing references and allusions to the Bible across the entire Beckett oeuvre, Chris Ackerley observes that ‘there is probably some biblical text that can be wrenched into a comment on anything’. C. J. Ackerley, ‘Samuel Beckett and the Bible: A Guide’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 9.1 (1999), pp. 53–125 (55).
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