Samuel Beckett’s Sous-Oeuvre
Genetic criticism has traditionally focused on the unit of one publication, one work as a structural principle. In Pierre-Marc de Biasi’s seminal typology of the genetic documentation, for instance, the implied focus is on separate works in relative isolation from the rest of the oeuvre. De Biasi defines the collection of genetic documentation (dossier de genèse) as ‘the whole body of known, classified, and transcribed manuscripts and documents connected with a text whose form has reached, in the opinion of its author, a state of completion or near completion’ (2004, p. 31, my emphasis). The ‘typology of genetic documentation’ is presented as ‘a general table of the stages, phases, and operational functions that enable the classification of different types of manuscripts according to their location and status in the process of a work’s production’ (p. 32, my emphasis). The use of both the notions of ‘genetic dossier’ and ‘avant-texte’ have proved their adequacy in the past five decades, but there is an understandable tendency to apply genetic criticism to separate works of literature. To some extent, this tendency is conditioned by the affordances but also the limitations of the print medium and the way complete-works editions have traditionally been presented – as a series of separate works, each bound in its own cover.
This essay is a suggestion to open up the notion of the genetic dossier and adopt a panoramic view of an entire oeuvre’s genetic dimension. Instead of focusing on the genesis of one individual work and its avant-texte, it is often useful to focus on the genesis of the oeuvre as a whole and work with the notion of the sous-oeuvre, in a slightly more specific sense than Thomas C. Connolly’s understanding of the term (2018) as the marginalised parts of a work that are traditionally eclipsed. It would be beneficial to open up the canon to include all the notes and drafts, sketches and even books in the author’s personal library if it is still preserved.
Since every genetic dossier is marked by lacunae, it may be useful to take a step back and have a look at what Charles Darwin called the ‘imperfections of the geological record’.1 The geological record is usually pictured as a succession of layers of sediment. Darwin was a trained geologist, and he dedicates an entire chapter to ‘The Imperfection of the Geological Record’. It is a rather crucial chapter. To prove that species could evolve, he had to prove that, between one species and another species, there had been ‘intermediate varieties’, and that many of these ‘intermediate varieties’ had become extinct. So, in a perfect geological record, the fossils of all these intermediate varieties would have to be discernible in successive layers of sediment. If we translate this to De Biasi’s typology, consisting of five major phases, the result is a vertical cross section of five layers, from the precompositional phase (the deepest layer), over the compositional, prepublishing and publication phases, to the postpublication (the top layer). Ideally, we would have paper fossils for every phase or every layer. But of course, that is not always the case. That was the point Darwin tried to make in his chapter. He realised that his critics might confront him with the question:
Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record. [1859, p. 280]
And so, Darwin tried to explain this imperfection by means of marine animals:
Most marine animals have a wide range; and […] it is those which have the widest range, that oftenest present varieties; so that with shells and other marine animals, it is probably those which have had the widest range […] which have oftenest given rise, first to local varieties and ultimately to new species; and this again [this wide range] would greatly lessen the chance of our being able to trace the stages of transition in any one geological formation. [1859, p. 298]
So, when confronted with two forms, it is often not possible to prove that they are actually of the same species ‘until many specimens [of intermediate varieties] have been collected from many places’ (p. 298). This ‘wide range’ also implies that, instead of a neatly layered slice of underground, we are dealing with a much more complex underground structure that shows cross-cutting relationships between various geological features.
Writers often have several book projects underway concurrently. If we want to pay extra attention to forms of concurrent writing or creative concurrence in genetic criticism, this implies that we reconstruct the everyday reality of how a work, in all its draft versions, interacted with the other works that populated the author’s writing desk at any given moment. The starting point is a case study reported on in Variants (Van Hulle, 2021), illustrating how interwoven the geneses of an author’s individual works can be. The point I would like to make is that it is always useful, and sometimes necessary, to place the genesis of a work in the context of the oeuvre as a whole.
The case study is an attempt to reconstruct Samuel Beckett’s writing desk in the late 1970s. He was already working on a longer piece of prose, called Company, when he received a commission. In 1977, the actor David Warrilow asked him to write ‘a monologue on death’ (Beckett, 2016, p. 471, note 1). Beckett replied on 1 October with the line ‘My birth was my death’ (p. 471, note 1) and the very next day, under the preliminary title ‘Gone’, he already started developing the theme: ‘My birth was my death’ is the opening sentence of the first draft of what was to become a play called A Piece of Monologue (Beckett Collection, University of Reading (hereafter UoR) MS 2068, folio 01r). In other words, as soon as one is born, one starts dying. In the top left corner in this manuscript, Beckett wrote the rather mysterious note: ‘all 3rd’, and indeed in the next version (the first typescript, UoR MS 2069) the narrative voice suddenly changes from a first-person to a third-person narrator. As a result, the opening line becomes more ambiguous, for the sentence ‘Birth was his death’ leaves open the possibility that the protagonist’s birth meant the death of someone else. This ambiguity is even more pronounced in the published version of A Piece of Monologue: ‘Birth was the death of him’. There is an autobiographical dimension to this ambiguity. Since Beckett was born on Good Friday 1906, that death of someone else could be Jesus Christ’s suffering on the cross.
The transition from the manuscript to the typescript is quite a jump and one wonders whether there haven’t been any ‘intermediary varieties’ that give us a sense of how and why Beckett made the change from first- to third-person narration in this play. Around the same time, on a piece of paper, Beckett was drafting a French poem (‘fleuves et océans’) that is dated ’Ussy Toussaint 77’ (1 November 1977). The next day, on 2 November, he wrote to Jocelyn Herbert that he was writing several pieces simultaneously. The manuscripts indicate that, on 1 November 1977, he was working on at least three literary projects in three different genres at the same time: the prose piece Company, the play A Piece of Monologue and the poem ‘fleuves et océans’. On the one hand, the commissioned play had a thematic impact on the content of the poem, which opens with a pun on the standard expression ‘ils l’ont laissé pour mort’ (they left him for dead): ‘fleuves et océans / l’ont laissé pour vivant’. Like in the opening sentence of A Piece of Monologue, being alive (‘vivant’) is presented as a process of dying. The creative concurrence becomes very material in this case, because the poem is drafted on one side of a scrap of paper, the other side of which is covered with notes for A Piece of Monologue (UoR MS 2460, m18, folios 01r and 01v; Van Hulle, 2021). It is not entirely clear which of the two sides was written first, and it cannot be excluded that, vice versa, the poem also had an impact on the play. The loose jottings at the back of the poem’s draft also thematise death, as in: ‘Less dying to be done’; ‘Less to die. To die from. To die with. Ever less’; ‘Not much left to die’ and ‘Dead & gone / Dying & going’. Towards the end of the scrap of paper, the jottings become more concrete and start reading like stage settings for A Piece of Monologue, such as the following idea for the opening stage directions: ‘Fade up. 10.” “Birth.” 10”. Birth was his death. Etc.’
The line ‘Birth was his death’ corresponds with the first typescript of A Piece of Monologue, which suggests that there is a synergy between the third-person narrative in this version of the play and the third person in the poem ‘fleuves et océans / l’ont laissé pour vivant’. And the note is also the initial idea for a stage direction, so it can be considered as a first draft of the stage direction that was typed out for the first time in the second typescript (UoR MS 2070).
All the while, however, the manuscript of the prose text Company was still on Beckett’s desk as well. The concurrence between the drafts of Company and A Piece of Monologue even became a form of confluence at some point. After working on both projects concurrently for about eight months, Beckett tried on 17 May 1978 to insert an excerpt from A Piece of Monologue into Company, resulting in yet another change of the personal pronoun: birth was not ‘my death’ nor ‘his death’ but ‘the death of you’ (MS UoR 1822, folio 25r, my emphasis). To transform the play into a prose piece, Beckett had to cut four sentences, because they all related to the act of looking (Engelberts, 2001, p. 211). Soon, however, he decided that this merger did not work after all, and he cancelled the insertion in the Company manuscript with a large St Andrew’s cross (MS UoR 1822, folio 25r). After this brief attempt to merge the play and the prose piece, the three concurrent projects were published separately. Still, the creative concurrence remains noticeable in the themes of life as a form of dying and ‘his’ birth being both the death of the protagonist and that of Christ.
The creative concurrence is noticeable in other works by Beckett and remains noticeable in the conspicuous use of one particular word: ‘faint’. For instance, in a late work called Stirrings Still (1989), there is an interesting moment in the genesis relating to this word. In this text, an old man considers whether his life is still worth living or whether it would be better to ‘stir no more’. He hears a voice ‘from deep within’, suggesting what it would be like to be ‘where never till then’ (life after death), but in the sentence he hears from deep within there is one crucial word he does not catch: ‘oh how [and here a word he could not catch] it were to end where never till then’ (Beckett, 2009a, p. 114). The rest of the text suggests that the missing word might be ‘bad’ or the opposite. Depending on the missing word, it will be good or bad to die; since he cannot hear the missing word, the uncertainty keeps him alive. The reason why he cannot hear the word is that it is too ‘faint’ (‘and then again faint from deep within…’) (Beckett, 2009a, p. 114).
Nothing in the published text suggests that this word might be an intertextual reference, but genetic research has unearthed some useful extra information: the notebook containing the earliest drafts features an Italian quotation on the left-hand page, facing the word ‘faint’ in the body of the text (Van Hulle, 2011). The quote reads: ‘per lungo silenzio fioco’, followed by Beckett’s own translation, marked by an open variant: ‘faint / hoarse from long silence’. The passage derives from Dante’s Inferno, Canto I, where Virgil appears for the first time as Dante’s guide. He appears ‘fioco’, which can be either ‘faint’ (in visual terms) or ‘hoarse’ (in auditory terms). Because Virgil has not spoken for centuries, the auditory interpretation would make sense, but then again, at that moment in the text, Virgil has not yet spoken to Dante, so his voice cannot appear ‘hoarse’. Beckett made this observation in the 1920s in one of his student notebooks when he studied Italian literature. More than fifty years later, he was apparently still preoccupied by this dilemma: in the manuscript of Stirrings Still, underneath the Dante quotation, he first crossed out ‘faint’, considered replacing it by ‘hoarse from long silence’ (which would have been a direct intertextual reference), but then crossed it out as well and decided to insert ‘faint’ again. So, at the surface level (the syntagmatic axis of the published text) nothing seems to have changed (‘faint’ remains ‘faint’), but underneath the surface (the diachronic, paradigmatic structure of the textual genesis), there appears to be an intertextual iceberg of which the word ‘faint’ is just the tip. The reference is important in itself, but the fact that Beckett undoes it is possibly even more significant as it exemplifies his poetics of ignorance: instead of showing off his erudition, Beckett consciously downplayed it. But that does not mean the reference is not there; genetically informed readers are aware of its ‘underground’ presence in the manuscripts.
This intertextual connection opens up a whole new intratextual dimension: since the word ‘faint’ clearly had a very specific intertextual, Dantean meaning for Beckett, the next step is to see how this word functions in all of Beckett’s works and to what degree it has a similarly Dantean resonance over the course of his career. ‘Faint’ is the first word of the play A Piece of Monologue after the curtain had risen, starting with the following stage directions:
Curtain.
Faint diffuse light.
Speaker stands well off centre downstage audience left.
White hair, white nightgown, white socks.
Two metres to his left, same level, same height, standard lamp, skull-sized white globe, faintly lit. [Beckett, 2009b, p. 117]
Not only is the light in general ‘faint’ and ‘diffuse’, but the white globe is ‘faintly’ lit as well. This opening stage direction features several textual variants in the avant-texte, but they are all variations on the theme ‘faint’, such as ‘Infinitely faint diffuse light’ and ‘Faintest diffuse light’ (MS UoR 2069, folio 04r). And the word recurs in various forms throughout the text. In and of itself, this word is rather inconspicuous. It is indeed faint, also in the sense that it doesn’t strike anyone as particularly strong. It is a word that rather tries to efface itself, which makes it so suitable for this play, consisting of only one speaker onstage and next to him a standard lamp of the ‘same height’ with a ‘skull-sized white globe, faintly lit’. The plan on the scrap of paper stipulated that at the end of the play, the light was to fade out: ‘End: fade out general light. Hold on globe. Fade out globe’ (MS UoR 2460). And in the published version, the light of the globe is said to be ‘unutterably faint’. There are more than a dozen occurrences of the word ‘faint’ in the play:
Faint diffuse light. Speaker stands well off centre downstage audience left. […] Two metres to his left, same level, same height, standard lamp, skull-sized white globe, faintly lit. […] Till faint light from standard lamp. Wick turned low. And now. This night. Up at nightfall. Every nightfall. Faint light in room. […] Room once full of sounds. Faint sounds. […] Fewer and fainter as time wore on. […] Faint light in room. Unutterably faint. […] Faint cry in his ear. Mouth agape. […] Turns away at last and gropes through faint unaccountable light to unseen lamp. […] Nothing faintly stirring. […] Nothing stirring. Faintly stirring. […] On all sides nowhere. Unutterably faint. The globe alone. Alone gone. [Beckett, 2009b, pp. 117–22]
At first sight, its function seems mainly to translate the cycle of birth and death to the visual metaphor of the globe, the switching on and off of the mind in the skull. But ‘faint’ also applies to sounds. There is both a visual and an auditory dimension to this word. And sometimes it refers to a combination of both senses, as in ‘faintly stirring’. Beckett seems to try and convey a sense of synaesthesia by means of this word. This synaesthetic dimension may not be particularly striking if this play is analysed as a separate unit, even if one has access to the entire genetic dossier. But when one opens up the genetic dossier to include the entire sous-oeuvre, i.e. the entire Beckett canon, including all the manuscripts – the entire genetic underground so to speak – the genetically informed reader may discover something else.
Our notion of the oeuvre is often coloured by the print paradigm. This print paradigm has conditioned us to focus on single reading texts and to compartmentalise the oeuvre in separate volumes. One could compare it to a railway system in a big city like London: every volume corresponds to a railway station, and every railway station is a separate unit, an endpoint. The challenge for genetic critics is to create a metro system that connects these termini by discovering the underground connections between them. In the example of the word ‘faint’ in Stirrings Still, archival research shows that there is an underground connection to something Beckett read fifty years earlier: Dante’s Divina Commedia; and that this in turn connects to various instances of the word ‘faint’ in several of Beckett’s other works.
To reconnect this to Darwin’s ‘imperfections of the geological record’: by taking account of this wider range of the oeuvre as a whole, we may be able to discover more of these underground connections. And perhaps not only underground connections. If, in the underground metaphor, the ‘bon à tirer’ is the border between text and avant-texte or oeuvre and sous-oeuvre, and if this sous-oeuvre consists mainly of endogenesis and exogenesis, then there is also an entire field of genetic research that needs to be done on the level of the ‘epigenesis’ – the continuation of the genesis after publication. Often, this field has been seen as the remit of scholarly editing, but I think it is important that genetic critics also study this type of epigenetic development. The following example shows how the theme of ‘imperfect itineraries’ is also applicable to the epigenesis of literary works. Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape is about a writer who has the habit of recording a tape, every year, on his birthday, reflecting on the year that has just gone by. A few years after the completion of the play, and after having translated it into French with the help of Pierre Leyris as La Dernière Bande, Beckett was approached by the German publisher Suhrkamp to make a trilingual edition. This involved collaboration with the German translator. But for Beckett, it was also an opportunity to make a few changes to the English and French texts. When he revised the English version, he changed the ‘cardboard’ boxes (containing his tapes) into ‘tin’ boxes. To make this revision in the French version, he changed ‘carton’ into ‘fer blanc’. The whole play balances on the interaction between darkness and light, black and white. By changing ‘carton’ into ‘fer blanc’ he introduced an extra ‘white’ element in the play, resulting in a sort of imbalance between light and darkness – another ‘imperfection’, as it were. Because of the imbalance created by the white element (‘blanc’), Beckett thought it was necessary to introduce another black element, and he changed ‘mon vieux point faible’ to ‘mon vieux point noir’ in the French translation. As with the exo- and endogenetic changes in the previous sections, epigenetic revisions can have a textual impact that often transcends the confines of what is usually defined as an individual work’s avant-texte.
To conclude, genetic criticism deals with paper fossils and is often confronted with similar situations as the ones referred to by Darwin as the ‘imperfections of the geological record’. His solution to this problem is still valuable. There are usually lacunae in the genetic dossier. To establish a connection between versions, it often helps to search for ‘many specimens [that] have been collected from many places’ (Darwin, 1859, p. 298). Translated to genetic criticism, this means the attempt to reconstruct what was on the writer’s desk at any given moment and map the creative concurrence to see how one work had an impact on the genesis of another. This approach implies that we open up the notion of the genetic dossier and always try to place a work in the context of the oeuvre as a whole, including the sous-oeuvre.