Alan Friedman - Surreal Beckett: Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, and Surrealism

Surreal Beckett

Surreal Beckett situates Samuel Becketts writings within the context of James Joyce and Surrealism, distinguishing ways in which Beckett forged his own unique path, sometimes in accord with, and sometimes at odds with, these two powerful predecessors. Beckett was so deeply enmeshed in Joyces circle during his early Paris days (1928 to the late 1930s) that James Knowlson dubbed them his Joyce years. But Surrealism and Surrealists rivaled Joyce for Becketts early and continuing attention, if not affection, so that Raymond Federman called 192945 Becketts surrealist period. Considering both claims, this volume challenges the boundaries between them. Received wisdom largely maintains that Becketts Joycean connection and influence negatively impacted his early works, and that Beckett found his voice only when he broke the connection after Joyces death. Beckett came to accept his own inner darkness as his subject matter, writing in French and using a first-person narrative voice in his fiction and competing personal voices in his plays. Critics have mainly viewed Becketts Surrealist connections as roughly co-terminus with Joycean ones, and ultimately of little enduring consequence. Surreal Beckett argues that both early influences went much deeper for Beckett as he made his own unique way forward, transforming them, particularly the Surrealist ones, into resources that he drew upon his entire career. Ultimately, Beckett endowed his characters with resources sufficient to transcend limitations their surreal circumstances imposed upon them.

Alan Warren Friedman, Thaman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas, Austin, has also taught at universities in England, France, and Ireland. His five authored books include Fictional Death and the Modernist Enterprise, Party Pieces: Oral Storytelling and Social Performance in Joyce and Beckett, and Multivalence: The Moral Quality of Form in the Modern Novel, and monographs on Lawrence Durrell and William Faulkner.

Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.

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Novel Listening
Justin St. Clair

Poetry as Testimony
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Antony Rowland

Dramatizing Time in Twentieth-Century Fiction
William Vesterman

James Joyce, Science, and Modernist Print Culture
The Einstein of English Fiction
Jeffrey S. Drouin

British Spy Fiction and the End of Empire
Sam Goodman

Jorge Luis Borges, Post-Analytic Philosophy, and Representation
Silvia G. Dapa

Silent Film and U.S. Naturalist Literature
Time, Narrative, and Modernity
Katherine Fusco

Situationist International in Britain
Modernism, Surrealism, and the Avant-Garde
Sam Cooper

Surreal Beckett
Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, and Surrealism
Alan Warren Friedman

Surreal Beckett

Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, and Surrealism

Alan Warren Friedman

First published 2018

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ISBN: 978-1-138-10302-3 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-10258-0 (ebk)

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Becketts path to becoming the writer we know as Samuel Beckett was a circuitous and complex one geographically, intellectually, psychologically, aesthetically. It is a journey that, in recent years, has been increasingly well, if variously, charted by Daniel Albright, Deirdre Bair, Enoch Brater, Ruby Cohn, Anthony Cronin, John Fletcher, S. E. Gontarski, Lois Gordon, James Knowlson, David Lloyd, Mark Nixon, Lois Oppenheim, John Pilling, and Dirk Van Hulle, among others. To all of them (and to numerous others), this study owes a great debt, as will be obvious throughout.

I am grateful to the Harry Ransom Center and to the British Library for aiding my research at their remarkable facilities, and to the University of Texas for affording me research support and time. Ira Nadel organized and ran a Beckett and Surrealism panel at the 2016 Modern Language Association (MLA) meeting, during which a portion of this book had its first airing. Michael Gillespie, who twice read through the entire manuscript, offered both encouragement and invaluable criticism. Colleagues who provided much in the way of encouragement, insight, suggestions, as well as friendship include James Cox, David Kornhaber, Domino Perez, Coleman Hutchison, and Dean Young. Martin Lockerd served as an assiduous editorial and research assistant during the projects final stages, combing diligently through the manuscript, unhesitatingly noting inadequacies in the argument, confused thinking, contradictions, redundancies, and infelicities of all sorts, and also obtaining permissions for and reproducible versions of the illustrations.

The following kindly granted permission to reproduce images: