Beckett and Poststructuralism. - book review

Criticism, Summer, 2001 by Thomas J. Cousineau

Beckett and Poststructuralism by Anthony Uhlmann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. x 202. $64.95 cloth.

In this wide-ranging and ambitious book Anthony Uhlmann proposes to analyze the relationship between Samuel Beckett's trilogy of novels (Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable) and two related areas: the historical circumstances within which it was written and the poststructuralist philosophical conceptions to which it bears a special affinity. His introductory chapter raises the question of how such divergent forms of cultural production as philosophy and literature can be related. In responding to this question, Uhlmann invokes the inherent reciprocity of the activities of the writer and the philosopher, with "literature moving from the particular towards the general, philosophy from the general to the particular." He offers as a specific example of this reciprocity the concept of "haecceity," which is both a philosophical concept and a form of sensation; thus "the apprehension of immanence described by Beckett might be understood as a sensation of a concept, while on the other hand, the concept of `haecceity' described by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus ... might be understood as an attempt to conceptually describe the sensation (or the apprehension) of immanence, and therefore it might be called a concept of a sensation." Accordingly, a major concern of his book will be the relationship between the "sensations of concepts" produced by Beckett the writer and the "concepts of sensations" produced by such philosophers as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas.

The relationship of literature and philosophy to the third term of Uhlmann's investigation, that is, the political situation in France both during and after World War II, is presented in terms that have been made familiar by poststructuralist thought. Thus, circumstances in France constitute a "problem field" that reveals in an especially striking way the "fundamentally fascistic nature of judgments dependent on the concept of the unified subject." It follows that the figure of the "decentered subject," encountered both in the trilogy and in the work of poststructuralist thinkers, may be conceived as a response to the particular character of this historical moment.

The major part of the book is composed of six chapters, two on each novel of the trilogy. In each of these, Uhlmann's method consists in drawing the reader's attention to an aspect of the novel in question, which he then relates at some length to comparable features of poststructuralist thought or to the historical situation that nourished both the trilogy and poststructuralism. He compares Molloy, for example, to Michel Foucault's essay Discipline and Punish and to Marcel Ophuls's film The Sorrow and the Pity, characterizing Beckett's novel as based upon an opposition between "surveillance and power" on one hand and freedom on the other, "which is closely tied to questions of indiscipline, ignorance and failure." He then finds evidence of a similar opposition in Foucault's description of Beasse, a thirteen-year-old vagabond, in Discipline and Punish and in the behavior during the war of a group of upper-middle-class French youths, called "les zazous," who openly flaunted their disrespect for the Vichy government.

In the second of the chapters devoted to Molloy, Uhlmann begins by distinguishing between Molloy himself, whose narrative "might be read as an attempt to express a kind of existence outside order," and Moran, whose narrative "might be read as an attempt to express a kind of existence within order, the ruled and regulated society." He then relates this observation to the opposition between the "molar" and the "molecular" as well as to the concept of "inclusive disjunction" that Deleuze and Guattari propose in The Anti-Oedipus. This is followed by a discussion of Beckett's description of "involuntary memory" in his book on Marcel Proust as well as of related notions in the works of Foucault and Henri Bergson. Molloy's wandering is seen to echo the vagabondage described by Foucault in Discipline and Punish as well as the "line of flight or escape" invoked by Deleuze and Guattari. A lengthy concluding phase of this chapter analyzes the novel from the perspective of the interrelationship between perception and sensation. This prepares the way for Uhlmann's judgment of Moran as a character who, beginning "as one unable to apprehend because he is too ready to perceive," undergoes a metamorphosis whereby he "stops perceiving and begins to apprehend."

Uhlmann begins his discussion of Malone Dies by noting that the passage from Molloy to the second novel of the trilogy involves a shift of emphasis from "a so-called external to a so-called internal world" that preserves, nonetheless, Beckett's central preoccupation with the relationship between order and chaos. Seen against the background of Vichy and, later, Gaullist France, this novel essentially "involves bringing into existence, or creation, through the affirmation of one's being, rather than through the subjectification and oppression of other beings brought about by judgment." This insight is followed by an overview of various atrocities that have occurred in France, ranging from the Saint Bartholomew's massacre of Huguenots on the night of 23 August 1572 through the murder of an estimated two hundred Algerians, ordered by Maurice Papon on 17 October 1961.