Editing Beckett - editing errors and the changing texts of Samuel Beckett

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1995 by S.E. Gontarski

Even the phase "corrected" if not "definitive" texts threatens to revivify the epistemological paradigm that meaning is somehow contained immutably within and restricted to a text, impervious to the inconsistencies of language and the vicissitudes of culture, a notion particularly dubious in the theater. Further, the idea of "correct" texts suggests a linear, evolutionary model of literary history where later versions are by definition improvements of or progress beyond the former and so supersede them. In the case of Beckett's theatrical texts (and even his translations) -- that is, those cases where multiple and parallel texts exist -- such assumptions are dubious.

The problems of textual validity and stability are further complicated in Beckett's case by his own fundamental authorial and so textual ambivalence. On the one hand, Beckett has abandoned the author's traditional role as textual authority, the final arbiter of meaning, by steadfastly refusing interpretation of his own works. In a letter to his American publisher, Barney Rosset, Beckett, for instance, expressed his own diminished authority soon after the writing of Godot: "had a highly unsatisfactory interview with SIR Ralph Richardson who wanted the low-down on Pozzo, his home address and curriculum vitae, and seemed to make the forthcoming of this and similar information the condition of his condescending to illustrate the part of Pozzo. Too tired to give satisfaction. I told him that all I knew about Pozzo was in the text, that if I had known more I would have put it in the text, and that this was true also of the other characters which I trust puts an end to that star." To critic Colin Duckworth Beckett announced, "I produce an object. What people make of it is not my concern.... I'd be quite incapable of writing a critical introduction to my work" (En Attendant xxiv). Asked by his assistant at the rehearsals of Endspiel (Endgame), "Are you of the opinion that the author should have a solution for the riddle at hand?" Beckett replied curtly, "Not the author of this play" (Haerdter). In a letter of 26 October 1957 to his long-time American director Alan Schneider he admitted, "Sorry I was not of more help about the play [Endgame] but the less I speak about my work the better" (185). And in rehearsals for Endgame in London in 1980, Rick Clutchey, who was playing Hamm under Beckett's direction, asked Beckett directly if the little boy in Hamm's narrative was actually the young Clov. "Don't know if the little boy is the young Clov, Rick," Beckett responded, "simply don't know" (in presence of S.E.G.).

On the other hand, Beckett has exercised so much authorial control over the production of his plays, even taking legal action against some forms of textual deviation, most recently posthumously through his estate against the Fiona Shaw / Deborah Warner production of Footfalls in London's West End, that he has maintained more authorial control over his work and performances than any other writer in history -- with the possible exception of James Joyce, who seems to have manipulated the early criticism of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake fairly directly. Yet despite correcting a variety of proofs for various editions, Beckett allowed obvious textual inconsistencies to stand, namely in the text of Come and Go, whose English version has four lines missing at the opening and two at the closing. With Come and Go the textual variants were the result of simultaneous translation. Beckett added some six lines to the 121 words of the English version while translating the work into French and after sending John Calder a typescript for publication. All British editions were subsequently based on the incomplete Calder text while the French and German editions contain the six lines added in translation.(9) The American edition used first the later typescript which included the six lines, but then for convenience photo-offset the British edition for subsequent publications and so lost the six lines. Those six lines, incidentally, have been added by the editor to the text published in Volume IV of the Theatrical Notebooks. Beckett was still undecided about the final text of Endgame in 1987, forty years after writing it. Going over the "final" text, for the final time before its final publication in the Endgame volume of the Theatrical Notebooks, Beckett was still undecided whether or not, when Clov hits Hamm with the toy dog, Hamm should retain the dog or let it fall.