118 J O U R N A L O F B E C K E T T S T U D I E S

Andrew Gibson, Samuel Beckett (Critical Lives). London: Reaktion

Books, 2009. 208pp. 10.95. ISBN: 9781861895172.
Andrew Gibsons Samuel Beckett is in no sense a comprehensive
biography, nor does it pretend to be. As the Introduction argues,
if biography acts as a necessary celebration of a life, then Becketts
fuck life aesthetics runs entirely counter to such a project.
Accordingly, Gibson sets out to offer a life of Beckett more in-
keeping with the authors own minimalism, and so, paradoxically,
to write a biography more attuned to a man who so often appears
to loathe the bios (14). Of course, given Gibsons parameters, it is
hardly surprising that those who have read Knowlson and Cronin
(both to whom Gibson recognises a considerable debt) will gain
little in terms of the facts of Becketts life. Nor is there much to be
gained here in terms of tracing the real within the ctional, such as
Eoin OBrien identifying the whistling postman in Watt. (Although
Gibson does track down the brand of thermowool Molloy alludes
to, and even produces an advert for it.) Yet there is much to
be gained here, as Gibson offers some important innovations in
emphasis as he interweaves historical milieux with certain facets
of Becketts work.
The book is arranged chronologically, but not equally so.
Becketts rst stay in Paris from 1928 to 1930 and his brief stay in
Germany in 1936 to 1937 are both given a chapter each, whereas
only a single chapter deals with the period 1950 to 1985 a period
which, of course, includes all of Becketts dramatic works. The
focus on the earlier years might speak to the tenacity of the
biographical form in which the child is presumed to be the father
to the man, and might also suggest that as Beckett becomes
(however reluctantly) a more social being through the auspices
of the theatre, his fuck life attitude, on which Gibsons Life
depends, may have been somewhat mitigated. There may be a
further reason for this imbalance in the book, as Gibson recognises
that the historical residue perceptible in the earlier work tends
to fade as one proceeds into the 1960s (133). The aim of the
book is to make some of the facets of this residue recoverable
as discrete historical contexts, thus rendering the life as a thin
trickle between circumstance and art (17). Given that the historical
contexts are discrete, necessarily Gibsons is an intermittent
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account and one in which intermittency becomes a method in
itself (22).
Some of the discrete historical contexts Gibson focuses on
are becoming familiar from the works of others: the rise of
the Irish Free State and the loss of Protestant ascendancy;
Becketts experiences as a migrant, post-colonial subject in London
underpinning Murphy; Beckett witnessing Nazism rst-hand; the
effects of his war-time wanderings and privations; the apocalyptic
madness of the Cold War. The apparent familiarity of such
moments should not detract from Gibsons revisions of what one
thought one knew.
For example, Becketts stay in Paris from 1928 to 1930 is not one
dominated by Joyce, but by the intellectual life of the cole Normale
Suprieure, the like of which has no parallel in the Anglo-American
world, and which is largely incomprehensible to it (15). That life
has two key aspects: intellectual independence, which would
often be expressed by the multi-layered, ironic and contradictory
humour of the canular, or elaborate, intellectual practical joke;
and, second, an almost arbitrary point of moral seriousness that
involved intellectual principle and required demanding and even
extreme forms of consistency (49). Gibson makes a strong case
for the inuence of the canular on Le Concentrisme, Le Kid,
Luckys speech in Godot, and most interestingly, Whoroscope. The
granite point of unyielding consistency can also readily be seen
in Becketts commitment to the integrity of his own work as
well as the moral and ethical stands he made throughout his
life.
The further French context of the Vichy regime and then the
post-war Gaullist purges and his mythologising of French war-time
heroics is also given due prominence. Godot has long been seen
as possibly emerging from Becketts and Suzannes wanderings in
Vichy France, but Gibson gives a much more precise sense of what
waiting entails in such a context. The attitude of attentisme whilst
multifaceted was ultimately a wait-and-see stance for those who
disagreed with the Vichy regime and who wished for a French
return to the war but who could not see immediate resistance as
a possibility. As Gibson wryly puts it this frequently meant [one]
should wait until the Americans were obviously coming out on
top (103). Attentisme also allowed for the ideologies of Vichy to be
120 J O U R N A L O F B E C K E T T S T U D I E S
outed, and Gibson duly argues that Luckys speech amounts to a
reductio ad absurdum of Vichy ideology (105).
In part to answer the disturbing frequency of apparently random
acts of violence, especially in the Trilogy, the purges which followed
the war are emphasised. The climate of suspicion and vicious acts
of reprisal are, it is argued, obliquely reected through the prose in
which a culprit is indispensible (Trilogy, 415), as the Unnamable
puts it. Also, Beckett resists the grand narrative of purication
and heroism that de Gaulle promulgated in the name of France
overcoming the shame and trauma of the war. Accordingly, Beckett
offers history [. . . ] as rubble, as debris (122) as the Trilogy
refuses the dictates of a coherent narrative of identication and
recovery.
These two French contexts are crucial for what appears to be
one of Gibsons underlying purposes in the book: to bridge the
Anglo-French divide in Beckett studies. There is a gently chiding
tone to his contention that Anglo-American academia may nd the
normalien world incomprehensible and that Beckettians have not
recognised the signicance of the revisionist Paxtonian revolution
in histories of Vichy and Gaullist France. As such, these chapters
offer a welcome corrective.
Not all the discrete contexts Gibson offers are equally successful.
His reading of the Cold War climate of the early 1950s that infuses
the profoundly wonky (138) Endgame then leaps forward to a
very different early 80s, and so entails a leap in the works to What
Where, Catastrophe and Quad. This begs a question: are those works
of the intervening years, such as All That Fall, Krapps Last Tape,
Eh Joe, to name but a few, in some sense anachronistic? Gibson
briey argues that Beckett occasionally reverts to one or other
of his former writing selves (132) which, if true, either calls into
question the precise historical frameworks in the book, or such
connection and disconnection to the historical should be reasoned
through, perhaps in-line with the method of intermittency Gibson
adopts. There are hints of this in the chapter devoted to 19859,
subtitled Capital Triumphans, where we nd Beckett in the world
of rampant capitalism as a wanderer who [. . . ] nds he has strayed
on to a not entirely featureless but not very interesting plateau
(156) and offers poignant gentleness (157) against the aggressive
consumerism of the times. Here, it would seem, historical
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relation lies precisely in not directly relating to the historical
moment.
Overall, and despite the mistrust of master narratives that the
volume often addresses, a clear vision of Beckett as a scapegoat
or pharmakos gure emerges. This is rst suggested by Gibsons
reading of Becketts appalling health whilst travelling around
Germany as a form of embodied social suffering. The concept
of the willing writer-scapegoat, whose art is a caught up in a
work of historical ridding or voiding (169), ingeniously allows
Gibson to range from the Irish context of the blame poets, to the
viciousness of the Second World War, to the theoretical realm of
Girard.
This move from the historical to the theoretical also perhaps
reveals the greatest ambition of this book, which is to marry
the speculative-theoretical and the historical-positivist branches of
Beckett studies. Such a marriage might not quite be one of equal
partners, for Gibson suggests that historical positivism is not anti-
philosophical, but rather explains why philosophical thought [. . . ]
was essential to Beckett (166). Nonetheless, this life of Beckett
offers one way to combine theory and history. The project is
underpinned by a conception of history derived from Alain Badiou
to such a degree that Gibson claims that his earlier Beckett and
Badiou and the current volume are the same book (23). The
difference is that the former is concerned with the event within
history (in Badious sense), and so must be abstract in nature,
whilst the latter deals with the remainder and so is necessarily
an exercise in historical materialism. Badiou is also a normalien,
as, so Gibson claims, is this book insomuch that he is writing
a life that is a non-life. Badious event and remainder certainly
allowfor intersections between the historical and the philosophical,
but it also implies a rare but denite hopefulness: we live in the
remainder, but the event is always possible. Gibson detects this
hopefulness in Beckett, albeit admittedly as a icker[ing] here and
there in his work (171). That hopefulness, however meagre, is
certainly part of Badiou, but there may be many readers who more
readily recognise the fuck life Beckett with which Gibson began.
Paul Stewart
DOI: 10.3366/jobs.2013.0062
122 J O U R N A L O F B E C K E T T S T U D I E S
WORKS CI T E D
Beckett, Samuel (1994), The Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable,
London: Calder.
Cronin, Anthony (1997), Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist, London:
Flamingo.
Knowlson, James (1996), Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, London:
Bloomsbury.
OBrien, Eoin (1986), The Beckett Country, Dublin: Black Cat Press.