Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989

Studies in Short Fiction, Fall, 1997 by Eyal Amiran

SAMUEL BECKETT: THE COMPLETE SHORT PROSE, 1929-1989, edited and with an introduction and notes by S. E. Gontarski. New York: Grove Press, 1995. xxxii 294 pages. $23.

This is an elegant and valuable work whose premises are impossible.

Beckett's writing, with its aspects of perfection and vulnerability, inspires both intimacy and loyalty. It has the rhetorical power to make its readers feel that they want nothing less than fairness and good measure when it comes to response to the work, to feel offended by offense to the work, and to feel that this reaction must be common to readers of Beckett. This desire for justice is well satisfied in this volume. Beckett's short work has appeared and reappeared in journals and collections, often with various errors, so it is welcome that the more or less obvious errors and accidental alterations in the texts at least be corrected and a reputable edition of the work established. S. E. Gontarski is the right person for the job: as author of valuable scholarly work on Beckett, and editor of the Journal of Beckett Studies, he has cared for Beckett's work intimately. Gontarski's editorial decisions inspire confidence. The volume's bibliography of Beckett's published short work is the most complete to date, and while this is a reading text and not an annotated scholarly edition, Gontarski's editorial decisions, recorded in "Notes on the Texts" at the end of the volume, appear sound and satisfying. Several wrongs are put right here. One, for example, is the claim that Beckett actually delivered "The Capital of the Ruins," an essay on the Irish Hospital at Saint Lo, as a radio address on Irish radio. Gontarski found that there is no record of this in the radio's archive, and Beckett reported to him no recollection of it in 1983. The text itself is also emended from earlier inaccurate versions, as is the text of "neither," a short piece that previously appeared in corrupt form in several places. These two textual interventions exemplify Gontarski's effort to correct mistakes reproduced, for instance, in Calder's 1990 volume, As the Story Was Told: Uncollected and Late Prose. There are also some previously unpublished materials here (including Edith Fournier's translation of "L'Image").

While this edition settles some matters, it unsettles others. Beckett's death provides an arbitrary but nearly transparent logic for a discussion of the wholeness of his writing; this editorial effort uses the categories of "short prose" and, less visibly, "the author" to argue for something complete in Beckett's work. Yet it does not include all of Beckett's short prose, and raises the question whether wholeness is the ruling criterion that scholarship often assumes it to be. This edition collects work that Beckett published as short (mostly the work assembled in the Collected Shorter Prose, 1945-1980), rather than short work he published. It does not make any effort to collect the nonfiction short prose--Beckett wrote a number of short essays and reviews--but uses the term to cover for the generic variance of Beckett's writing. Two fiction items missing, for example, are Worstward Ho, a short fiction made into book form by Grove's large print and a separate cover, and Company, a volume similar in length to The Lost Ones (which is included). Does the generic tag attached to these works at some point determine their inclusion? The collection does not explain this important issue, which is already raised by the word "complete." This is a question of a sense of the continuum too, because one rhetorical function of the collection is to form a new reading of Beckett's short work. Gontarski argues in the Introduction that Beckett's work should be read serially as an "ontological exploration of being in narrative," of dispersal and return (an argument with which I have agreed some years ago). Evidently Worstward Ho is not to be taken as part of that overall trajectory, but the Fizzles are, even though the latter rework and comment on material from the novels of the 1940s, whereas the former develops different material closely linked to shorts All Strange Away and Imagination Dead Imagine. It is difficult to formulate a vision of the wholeness of Beckett's work based solely on the short fiction, which cannot be so easily separated from the rest of the work. The notion of the whole, of whole work, is not supported by the collection; instead, the collection shows how compelling Beckett's rhetoric of wholeness can be--a rhetoric of beginning, of becoming, of ending. Beckett's work convinces the reader to think about completeness to the very degree that it, as epic fragments, denies it.

A related point made in the Introduction is that Beckett's short fiction belongs in the tradition of Irish storytelling. Some of it can be read convincingly this way, but almost any story has the dramatic quality Gontarski singles out. Though Beckett's work told in first person may be said to feature the voice more prominently--I don't find this argument appealing--part of the point of his writing overall surely is that there is a voice to any text, and textuality in any voice in literature, and that between them the two condemn us to the endless pilgrimage that is words: