Samuel Beckett as World Literature

There can be no argument that Samuel Beckett's work qualifies as World literature. The quibble comes in the finer points of hashing out the why. Enter fifteen essays by scholars from around the world in a 2020 volume edited by Thirthankar Chakraborty and Juan Luis Toribio Vazquez. Although a number of contributors refer to David Damrosch's How to Read World Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003) or Emily Apter's Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London: Verso, 2013) as authorities on what makes or does not make world literature, there emerged little (common) understanding of how Beckett's work belongs to World literature. The editors claim that this volume offers alternative readings to prevailing modes of approaching Beckett's oeuvre through labels such as “minimalism,” “absurdism” or even “modernism” and “postmodernism.”... The underlying purpose of the collection is thus to show how and why Beckett's texts are particularly resistant to any “contemporary pigeon hole”... Accordingly, the volume examines Beckett as a cosmopolitan author. (9) Although the editors don't unpack the European history and context of “cosmopolitan,” many Beckett scholars will recognize it. It is unclear how much Beckett's work “resists” in the ways the editors claim; after all, numerous essays here verify how Beckett's work is received and transferred by others worldwide into various alternative as well as coinciding interpretations.What seems obvious about Beckett as world author at the same time remains opaque. Beckett beyond borders? A trans-Beckett? The strongest pieces in this volume tend to highlight how Beckett is adapted to a particular non-white non-western-European scene, whether in Brazil, Japan, or China. Despite the diversity of the contributors and their cultural contexts, it was remarkable how many were reluctant to interpret race, color, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and other aspects of diversity.The editors chose to divide the book into three parts: I, Translation; II, Adaptation; and III, Circulation. At first glance, this seems logical, as choice of language is central to Beckett, who excelled in modern languages as an undergraduate at Trinity, and then used his multilingualism to even greater artistic advantage in Paris when he befriended Joyce. Well before Beckett purposively opted for French as his first language to write in after World War II (WWII), in the 1930s he was extensively reading and keeping notebooks, long swaths of quoted material from Descartes to Proust. Beckett was haunted by the power of influence of the words of writers—not just Joyce, but also many other inspirational writers back into earlier ages. How much are those writers of inspiration considered world writers? How does Beckett's interest in philosophers relate to world literature in terms of the play of ideas related to people across cultures, such as domination, suffering, desire, and embodiment? How to produce anything without making a copy? These were questions left unpursued.Unfortunately, a good portion of this first part of the book does not engage readers looking for new ideas about translation and world literature with Beckett in mind. Opening the entire book in Part I is an old 1970s essay by John Fletcher on “Bilingual Beckett.” One is hoping to read something new in a book published in 2020, given that much scholarship has transpired on translation and Beckett in the past forty years or so. In a footnote, the editors qualify they revised and updated the essay in consultation with Fletcher. Yet, these revisions do not include recent scholarship on translation and Beckett. Why open a whole collection with this essay, not written originally for the theme of the book? At least Dirk Van Hulle and Pim Verhulst provide good translation research (especially Sinéad Mooney's A Tongue Not Mine: Beckett and Translation, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011), but at the same time I struggled to see how their compartmentalization of a “French Beckett” and “German Beckett” and so on fit into a point to made about a World Beckett. The focus on English and French and some German and Spanish could be expected, as these were Beckett's own working languages. Readers looking for commentary on Beckett in other languages such as Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese will need to wait for later essays in the volume, and sift through the brief mentions of translation there. My point about the problematic positioning of these essays also relates to Erich Auerbach's worries in 1952 when he observed how the “world canon” is made up largely of works determined by American, European, and Russian academics. The editors of this volume bring up Auerbach's concerns: the concentration of these particular academics in canon creation “explains both the process and the dangers of standardization”: a levelling of the immense variety of literary traditions into “a single literary language” (Auerbach qtd. in Chakraborty and Toribio, Introduction, p. 4).Later in the collection, in Parts II and III, some scholars comment on translation into non-European languages. For example, Fábio de Souza Andrade's exploration of Brazilian Becketts engages in fascinating experiments with Beckett's works that become part of the Brazilian avant garde theater scene. De Souza Andrade provides exceptional insight into the actors, process, sets, cultural scene, including stunning photographs of Molloy as a theater piece Moi lui (2014) directed by Isabel Cavalcanti, and the adaptation of the piece Act without Words I to Sopro directed by the Guimarães Brothers. Such a study contrasts with impressionistic reflections such as Charlotta Palmstierna Einarsson's essay, which does not fulfill its title's promise to address affect in Beckett, let alone its “global applicability.” Similarly, lack of argument was a feature of several pieces, often appearing as collages.It would seem to be evident that, in 2020, a book on Beckett as World literature should open with scholarship by authors who are non-European/American/Russian, non-white, non-male-presenting. Some decentering can help highlight and diversify new scholarship especially if we as scholars of literature are aiming for new discussions of what “world” means. Why not open with a feminist piece or an African piece or a queer non-binary piece or an essay on disability? Why not interrupt the usual structures of canonicity? Moreover, while “world” is presented perfunctorily in some of the essays, it is scarcely acknowledged as a diverse and gendered world of many colors, ages, and abilities. The essays generally avoid critical examinations of race, class, and gender, and these and related terms are not present in the index. Many of the contributors tend to emphasize a linguistic and/or aesthetic approach, although this, too, could be better developed. While I understand the reasons to avoid organization by literary genre (given the numerous cross-genre adaptations and other intertextual usages of Beckett), there still could be some more deliberate grouping around drama as that was the focus of more than half of the essays.In Part III, entitled “Circulation,” there are many examples of adaptation. There was little reason to distinguish between Parts II and III (Adaptation and Circulation).The depth and quality of the essays range a good deal; many of the pieces are around ten pages in length, with a few studies stretching out a few more pages. I would have been happier with fewer essays given more space to develop textual interpretations and provide photographs or other supplementary knowledge.Particularly surprising in 2020 is the absence of African and African American scholars. In any ambitious collection, it is hard to be fully comprehensive and inclusive. But this particular absence surprised me. Beckett was interested in the Black experience in America, his works were performed in the South by Black artists, more recently his works have been performed in New Orleans and South Africa, with the location serving importantly as generating new layers of meaning. Also absent: philosophical, psychoanalytic, narratological approaches. Digital humanities could have come more clearly into play. Despite Beckett's heteroglossia and intertextuality (his and adaptions of his work), there was no textual analysis referencing Bakhtin, Kristeva, and related others.Beckett writes persistently about power, subjugation, and domination. These issues are understood and questioned around the world. Yet, surprisingly, these essays scarcely if ever acknowledge such relationships. The paucity of mention of empire, colonialism, color, and racism is confirmed in the short index.There were a few standout essays in this collection, accessible to a wide range of readers, from undergraduate students to seasoned scholars. In “100% Guaranteed Beckett: An Intercultural Reading of Beckett's Waiting for Godot as World Literature,” Mary O'Byrne and Wei Zheyu present an incredible collaborative project that develops a cross-cultural (Irish–French–Chinese) understanding of Waiting for Godot, with a particular emphasis on Lucky's monologue. This is really where reader reception theory and performance shine together. De Souza Andrade's piece on Beckett adaptations in Brazil is exquisite. Mariko Hori Tanaka's “Forgetfulness of the Past as Revealed in Minoru Betsuyaku's Godot Has Come: A Play Inspired by Waiting for Godot” is accomplished, although one wishes for more direct quotations. Intriguing essays about adaptations or “circulations” include “Tracing Beckett in the Avant-Garde Theatre of Mainland China” by Liu Aiying and “Waiting for the Arrivant: Godot in Two Poems by Nizar Qabbānī” by Hania A. M. Nashef. In both of these pieces, some more cultural contextualization would be welcome. For example, Qabbānī gets almost casually introduced as a Syrian diplomat who dabbled in poetry. Nashef could have explained, for non-Arabic scholars, how Qabbānī is considered by many to be the Syrian poet of the twentieth century—a romantic and a nationalist. All of these pieces would have flourished with a little more expansion.The volume overall left me wondering, Is it possible that the most “world” aspect of Beckett's work is his drama by merit of the fact that his dramas are performed and read worldwide?Taking a look at the comparative literature project of the Bloomsbury series Literatures as World Literature, edited by Thomas Beebee, one does question whether a single author or a single national literature “as World Literature” is capturing the comparative spirit of Damrosch's teaching, not that comparatists are obliged to adhere to it. As Beebee puts it himself, the project's challenge is in the “devilish details.” Bloomsbury has some eighteen titles in this series, ranging from Crime fiction (coedited by Damrosch) to German literature to Francophone Literature to single-author studies like Elena Ferrante (forthcoming) and Roberto Bolaño (a superb volume). As a comparatist, Damrosch particularly seeks out distant and unexpected groupings or pairings of literature, across languages, genres, and (at times vast) time periods. An example: his essay in the Crime Fiction as World Literature is “A Sinister Chuckle: Sherlock in Tibet,” indicating how world literature is not so much a text but a way to read it. I look forward to more in this series, as it charts numerous avenues for comparative literature.What can be some new directions for future work on Beckett as world literature? We might benefit from reflections in the essay by Mary O'Byrne and Wei Zheyu. At one juncture, they compare musicality in French and Chinese: One was Jean Martin's adaptation of the effects on the voice, speech and body of Parkinson's disease to portray Lucky in the Paris premiere, and the other was xiangsheng 相声, the traditional Chinese comedic art of crosstalk. We discussed two different cultural objectives: the Chinese interrogation of the human need to impress and the European concern with suffering, both being aspects of humanity's attempt to make sense of lived experience. What emerged as common to both cultures was a complicated response to what Stanton Garner describes in Beckett's work as “a set of essentially phenomenological questions concerning subjectivity, embodiedness, and perception.” Both dramatic devices were a vehicle for expressing performative movements of possibility but also impossibility in language. (74). Not only does this type of collaborative research promise enriching reflections such as this, but also points to how to carry out a sustained group project in the humanities across borders and languages through translation and video calls. While the scholars carried out their intercultural “free play” of Beckett's Lucky monologue via video calls and videos from February to April 2016, readers now, during the 2020–onward Covid pandemic, have experienced more than a year of heavy reliance on video conferencing. They will appreciate some of the future possibilities for enriching transcultural and transnational exchanges such as these

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