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Editing Beckett - editing errors and the changing texts of Samuel Beckett
Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1995 by S.E. Gontarski
The problem of textual authority or validity is further compounded in the theater by the collaborative nature of the theatrical enterprise itself and the inconsistent quality of the collaborators, problems about which Beckett was quite aware and which he took into account in his own directing. In the theater we may, on the whole, be more willing to accept the playscript as an incomplete artwork, something less than the final stage of a work's creation, a document which needs to be real-ized on stage through a set of intermediaries;(7) that admission suggests that theatrical texts are themselves extraliterary, if by literature we mean at very least a completed and consistent work of art.
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In Beckett's case the value of the performance is enhanced, given authority, by the fact that the author himself has directed his play. But the relation between performance -- even author-ized performance -- and published text remains as problematic with Beckett directing as with any other director. Quite clearly, as a director approaching his work afresh after at times a ten-year hiatus, Beckett continued reshaping his work, but many of his changes were not necessarily evolutionary, that is, necessarily improvements, but reflected particular circumstances. Beckett's revisions from production to production were not always consistent, a clear progressus. Two productions of the same work directed by Beckett -- even in the same language -- were not necessarily identical. If they were, there would have been little point doing the second. Beckett has often designed a text and production for a particular set of actors playing on a particular playing space under a particular set of circumstances. In a letter to Polish critic Marek Kedzierski (15 Nov. 1981),(8) for example, Beckett has admitted, "Herewith corrected copy of Fin de partie. The cuts and simplifications are the result of my work on the play as director and function of the players at my disposal. To another director they may not seem desirable." Even Beckett's own revised or "corrected" texts, then, seem something less than stable, absolute, or definitive, but instead subject to the subsequent intervention of future directors, that is, future readers. In Beckett's post-publication revision of Play, the note called "Repeat" ends with the phrase, "and so on if and as desired" (emphasis added). Presumably the indecision allows for future directorial flexibility, but whose desire then are we finally staging? The challenge for the textual editor working in the postmodern textual climate that Beckett himself has encouraged is to reconcile the traditional demands for a single final version of a text, one version bound between boards, and the theory of the incomplete or mutable text; that is, how does one reconcile the demand for a single text closest to the author's final textual intention and the postmodern notion of the multiplicity of texts? Such questions of textual plurality at least foreground much of the current theoretical debate about the nature of texts, textuality, and finally meaning, particularly in the theater.
