Modern Manuscripts and Textual Epi-

genetics: Samuel Beckett’s Works between

Completion and Incompletion

Dirk Van Hulle

modernism / modernity
In A Beckett Canon (2001), Ruby Cohn discusses Samuel volume eighteen,

Beckett’s works in chronological order. The discussion of each number four,

work starts with a footnote referring to the relevant manuscripts. pp 801–812. © 2012
The position of these references at the bottom of the page, the johns hopkins

printed in a smaller font than the body of the text, indicates the university press

balance of importance between the published texts and their

preparatory materials. The footnotes do not give an exhaustive ac-
count of what French genetic critics refer to as the “avant-texte,”
Dirk Van Hulle is
the full genetic dossier of extant manuscripts. Nonetheless, these
professor of Eng-
documents are deemed important enough to be mentioned. On lish literature at the
the one hand, the manuscripts are kept “underground”; on the University of Antwerp,
other hand, they do constitute a part of this canon. And some- and president of the
times a manuscript manages to slip into the “upper” canon. For European Society for
instance, unpublished manuscripts such as “Ernest et Alice” or Textual Scholarship. He
is the author of Textual
“Last Soliloquy” are treated in the body of the text rather than
Awareness; Manuscript
in footnotes.1 Apparently, the border between upper and under-
Genetics, Joyce’s Know-
ground canon is not impermeable. How, Beckett’s Nohow,
This article therefore endeavors to examine the “ontological and edited Beckett’s
status” of modern manuscripts within the field of literary studies, Company (Faber, 2009)
starting from the question: how do modern manuscripts relate and the first volume
to published texts?2 Modern manuscripts differ in function from of the Beckett Digital
Manuscript Project
medieval manuscripts, which had a public function; they were a
(2011). He is currently
form of publication. Modern manuscripts, conversely, are usually
working with Mark
more private in nature. Nonetheless, many twentieth-century au- Nixon on Beckett’s
thors have donated their manuscripts to public archives. Beckett Library (Cambridge,
is a case in point, not just because he donated so many of his forthcoming).
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

802 manuscripts, for instance, to the University of Reading and Trinity College, Dublin,
but also because of the interesting textual situation of many of his texts, which dangle
between completion and incompletion. This textual situation is not merely of interest
to philologists; it reflects an important thematic aspect of Beckett’s work. As a conse-
quence, the textual and genetic analysis of Beckett’s manuscripts and typescripts can
be usefully brought into play in the interpretation of his works in general.
A textual instance that is rather emblematic in this context is the opening passage
of Stirrings Still, section two:

As one in his right mind when at last out again he knew not how he was not long out
again when he began to wonder if he was in his right mind. For could one not in his right
mind be reasonably said to wonder if he was in his right mind and bring what is more
his remains of reason to bear on this perplexity in the way he must be said to do if he is
to be said at all?3

The atmosphere of uncertainty and vagueness is emphasized a few lines further down,
by means of the reference to Venus: “Then he sought help in the thought of one has-
tening westward at sundown to obtain a better view of Venus and found it of none.”4
Venus, the second planet from the sun, reaches its maximum brightness shortly before
sunrise or shortly after sunset and is therefore known both as the Morning Star and
the Evening Star. It marks the clair-obscur of dawn or dusk. To study this clair-obscur
from a genetic perspective, I would like to make use of two terms coined by Raymonde
Debray-Genette, “exogenetics” and “endogenetics,” to subsequently suggest a third
one, “epigenetics.”

Exogenetics

The term “exogenesis” denotes external source texts relating to the creative pro-
cess, such as the texts from which the jottings in the “Dream” Notebook derive.5 One
of these texts, discovered by John Pilling, is Sir James Jeans’s chapter, “Exploring the
Sky” from The Universe around Us.6 James Jeans explains that, as a morning star, Ve-
nus “was called Phosphorus by the Greeks and Lucifer by the Romans; as an evening
star it was called Hesperus by both.”7 Beckett noted all these names in his “Dream”
Notebook in the early 1930s:

Venus:        Morning        Evening

Phosporus [sic] Hesperus.
Lucifer8

Toward the end of the 1930s, Beckett still showed an interest in this topic. In the
“Whoroscope” Notebook, he noted that “Venus has a long day.”9 The source for this and
the surrounding notes can truly be announced as a “discovery”: the magazine Discovery:
A Monthly Popular Journal of Knowledge (New Series, vol. 2, no. 10, January, 1939)
 Hulle / modern manuscripts and textual epigenetics
contains an article called “Is There Life in Other Worlds?” by Dr H. Spencer Jones 803
(for a full transcript of the relevant excerpts, see Appendix). In and of itself the source
may not be as intellectually exciting as the notes on, say, Kant, Mauthner, Céline, and
Sartre that appear in the same notebook, but it indicates the scope of Beckett’s wide
interests during this period. Moreover, since this notebook contains very few dates, the
publication date of the Discovery issue of January 1939 serves as a useful terminus a
quo for the notes on the following pages of the notebook. Spencer Jones explains that

The temperature of Venus has been measured. The temperature of the sunlit face
reaches 80° or 90° F., whilst that of the dark face falls to about 40° below freezing
point. Venus has a long day; its length is not known exactly but it is somewhere about
thirty of our days. [The highlighted words are excerpted by Beckett in his notebook.]10

The fact that Venus has a long day has the effect of a magnifying glass. The difference
between the midday and midnight temperatures is greater, and so is the transition zone
between night and day, day and night. This alternation of day and night (“l’alternance
jour-nuit”)11 is zoomed in on in the earliest French drafts of Stirrings Still, written
more than forty years after Beckett jotted down these notes.

Endogenetics

The way these exogenetic elements were incorporated into the drafts is part of
what Debray-Genette calls “endogenesis.”12 In the “‘Dream’ Notebook,” Beckett jot-
ted down that Venus was also called “Hesperus” when regarded as the evening star.
Fifty years later, Beckett included Venus in the opening line of Mal vu mal dit / Ill
Seen Ill Said: “From where she lies she sees Venus rise.”13 And when he drafted the
second section of Stirrings Still (September 1985), he first incorporated “Venus,” and
then added “Hesperus” above the line: “Then he called to his help the image of one
hastening westward at sundown to obtain a better view of Venus Hesperus and found it
of none.”14 Venus, emblematic of the hesitation between day and night, presents itself
as an open variant, which in its turn is emblematic of textual hesitation, the textual
equivalent of twilight.
As this example shows, the endogenetic processing of exogenetic material does not
necessarily imply direct usage of notes. In his post-war writings, Beckett often drew
on reading notes he had made before the war. It is also remarkable how many of these
reading notes Beckett seems to have internalized or assimilated to such an extent that,
during the process of writing, he often did not need his notebooks anymore to conjure
up figures of script, such as the open variant Venus/Hesperus.
A similar open variant occurs in the final typescript, which served as printer’s copy.
The only substantial change in this last typescript of section two is the variant “no
knowing,” added at three instances. The first instance is a particularly nice open vari-
ant because the textual situation iconically represents the ignorance expressed by the
content of the alternative readings, “he knew not” or “no knowing”: “As one in his right
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

804 mind when at last out again he knew not no knowing how he was not long out again when he
began to wonder if he was in his right mind.”15 For quite a while, Beckett “knew not”
which of the two alternatives was le mot juste and he left the textual matter undecided.
On 6 June, 1988, John Calder wrote to Beckett to point out that “no knowing” was
written over “he knew not” in the printer’s typescript, but that the original phrase was
not crossed out. He asked Beckett which of the two variants he preferred. Three days
later, Beckett sent a card to Calder, suggesting that “he knew not” was the better op-
tion.16 So, at the very last stage, the text was still marked by incompletion, and it took
the publisher’s special intervention to come to completion.

Epigenetics

Even this completion at the “bon à tirer” moment was often relative. The notion of
continuous incompletion becomes more striking if the genesis continues after publica-
tion. Genetic criticism has traditionally focused mainly on the so-called “avant-texte,”
but the “après-texte” also deserves to be taken into account.17 Especially since Beckett’s
capacities as self-translator and self-director led to many textual changes after the
first publication. These changes are part of what—by analogy with Debray-Genette’s
terms—could be referred to as “epigenetics.” A good example is the so-called “Hain”
in Krapp’s Last Tape. In the textual notes to the revised text, published in The Theatri-
cal Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, James Knowlson explained that Beckett as a director
asked Martin Held (and later also Pierre Chabert in the production at the Théâtre
d’Orsay in 1975) “to look over his shoulder into the darkness backstage left,” as Krapp
“senses the presence of death lurking close at hand. Beckett regularly referred to this
look as a ‘Hain,’ following the eighteenth-century German writer, Matthias Claudius,”18
the author of the poem “Der Tod und das Mädchen.”19 Claudius actually dedicated his
complete works to Old Nick, “Freund Hain.”20 The result is an extra stage direction
in the “revised text”: “He closes the ledger, turns to the tape-recorder, makes to switch
on, arrests gesture, turns slowly to look over his shoulder into the darkness backstage
left, long look, then slowly back front.”21
In Waiting for Godot, a similar specification that was not part of the first edition of
the text was added to the stage directions. Just before the moment in the text where
Pozzo shouts “Stool!” the added stage direction specifies that Pozzo “goes across the
stage looking for a place for the stool.”22 The textual change makes Pozzo’s act of seating
himself and choosing the place to “posit himself” more explicit. This epigenetic addi-
tion can be linked to what Richard Begam has written on performativity in his article
“How to Do Nothing with Words, or Waiting for Godot as Performativity.”23 After an
introduction to J. L. Austin’s notions of locution, illocution, and perlocution (the utter-
ance, the force of the utterance, and its material effect), Begam notes:

Pozzo’s simple act of seating himself is one of the most elaborate exercises in rhetorical
illocution in all of theatre, involving no fewer than twenty performatives, which run over
the space of three pages: “Up pig!” “Up hog!” “Back!” “Stop!” “Turn!” “Closer!” “Stop!”
 Hulle / modern manuscripts and textual epigenetics
“Coat!” “Hold that!” “Coat!” “Whip!” “Stool!” “Closer!” “Back!” “Further!” “Stop!” “Bas- 805
ket!” “Basket!” “Further!” “Happy Days!”24

Richard Begam argues that, in the 1950s, Beckett’s work aligned itself with the language
philosophies of J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein introduced his no-
tion of the language game by contrasting his view with Augustine’s. To caricature the
Augustinian philosophy of language, Wittgenstein invented a language game in which
builders on a construction site communicate with a simple nomenclature consisting of
the words “block,” “pillar,” “slab,” “beam,” to eventually show that “what we imagined
was a series of constatives turns out to be a series of performatives.”25 As Begam notes,
Wittgenstein’s game undermines philosophical “foundationalism” à la Descartes, who
established philosophy on a firm foundation in the Discourse on Method:

It is no accident that in Descartes’ account, the cogito is pictured as sitting and thinking.
By rendering the subject static and stationary, by throwing under it (“sub-ject” literally
means “thrown under”) an unshakeable foundation, the philosopher symbolically enacts
the mental operation that will provide the “basis” or “ground” of his apodeictic philosophy.26

Wittgenstein is a paradigmatic case in the methodological discussion regarding the

issue of historicity, which comes down to the question: can one use Wittgenstein to
study Beckett even though we know—as Begam explicitly indicates (140)—that Beckett
had not yet read Wittgenstein when he wrote Waiting for Godot? Or would that come
down to reading Wittgenstein’s ideas into Beckett’s work? This methodological issue
has been thoroughly discussed in a debate between Garin Dowd and Matthew Feld-
man in the “Free Space” of Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui 20 (2008).27 Instead
of reopening this discussion, however, my suggestion is to look at the issue from an
epigenetic point of view. On the one hand, one could argue that Beckett did not need
Wittgenstein in order to recognize the performative aspect of language, which he had
already discovered through his intensive reading of Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik
der Sprache; on the other hand, one could also recognize that Beckett did appreciate
Wittgenstein once he was introduced to his works.
On 21 December, 1962, he mentioned in a letter to Barbara Bray that he was “read-
ing Pole on Wittgenstein again.”28 As Beckett’s copies of books by and on Wittgenstein
in his personal library indicate, he received at least a few of his Wittgenstein books
when he was in Germany, acting as a self-director for the first time (directing Endspiel
in 1967 at the Schiller Theater, Berlin).29 The inscription “Renate Handke / to Samuel
Beckett / Germany, 9-25-67” in Beckett’s copy of the two-volume Schriften by Ludwig
Wittgenstein (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1960) indicates that he received the volumes
the day before the premiere of Endspiel.30 The next year, Beckett wrote the short foi-
rade “Se voir,” beginning as follows: “Endroit clos. Tout ce qu’il faut savoir pour dire
est su. Il n’y a que ce qui est dit. A part ce qui est dit il n’y a rien.” [“Closed place. All
needed to be known for say is known. There is nothing but what is said. Beyond what
is said there is nothing.”]31 Marjorie Perloff reads this opening passage as an echo of
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

806 the last sentence of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: “It is the lesson of Wittgenstein: ‘Wovon
man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.’”32
So, by the time Beckett directed Waiting for Godot for the Schiller Theater in
1975, he had read Wittgenstein, and if one would like to argue that his work gradu-
ally aligned itself with Wittgenstein’s language philosophy, the addition to the stage
directions of the specification regarding the stool (“goes across the stage looking for a
place for the stool”) could be read as a way of emphasizing a Wittgensteinian aspect
that Beckett had discovered in his own play after its publication. Whether this means
he was “influenced” by Wittgenstein or consciously thought of “post-foundationalism”
when he added this line is another matter, which is not at issue here. My suggestion
is rather that Beckett’s own approach to his source texts and notes was not “founda-
tionalist.” Instead of treating source texts as a series of constatives, Beckett’s use of
his extensive reading can be regarded as a form of performativity. Genetic criticism,
in its turn, is not foundationalist either. It does not try to reduce literary criticism to
“blocks,” “pillars,” “slabs,” and “beams.” As Daniel Ferrer and Michael Groden note,
genetic criticism “aims to restore a temporal dimension to the study of literature” and
to “describe a movement, a process of writing that can only be approximately inferred
from the existing documents.”33 It is mainly interested in a form of performativity,
in the way exogenetic materials are processed in the course of the genesis. And this
processing does not end with the first publication; it is not limited to endogenetics,
but also includes epigenetic processing.
At the same time, it would be a pity if an emphasis on genetic and textual “performa-
tivity” led to an attitude within literary criticism that denigrated contextual, historical,
or archival research by laughing it off as mere source hunting. An integrated approach
is preferable.

Exo-endo-epi-

In order to chart Beckett’s textual “performativity” one needs to be aware of the

“blocks,” “pillars,” “slabs,” and “beams” as well. The example of the building site turns
the metaphor into a plump, coarse image, but with reference to the excerpts from the
journal Discovery, one might just as well choose another metaphor and refer to the
source texts as “stars” and “planets” in the Beckettian universe. Even an inconspicuous
note on the length of a day on Venus may be of potential use to future critics attempt-
ing to contextualize Beckett’s writings. As a pinch of intertextual stardust, the relevant
passages from Spencer Jones’s article are therefore added to this article (see Appendix).
From an epigenetic point of view it is often difficult to distinguish genetic “consta-
tives” with absolute certainty. For instance, if Pozzo’s portable stool may be read as
a parody of philosophical foundationalism, it may be useful to also include Beckett’s
favorite philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer was a dissident disciple of
Fichte. Beckett knew the gist of Fichte’s philosophy through his reading of A History
of Philosophy by Wilhelm Windelband, who discusses Fichte’s distinction between
the I and the Not-I:
 Hulle / modern manuscripts and textual epigenetics
The original “act” (Thathandlung) of self-consciousness, which is determined by nothing 807
except itself, is that the “I” or self can only be “posited” by being distinguished from a
“Not-I” or “not-self.” Since, however, the not-self is posited only in the self . . . the self
and the not-self (i.e. subject and object) must reciprocally determine each other within
the “I” or self.34

The notion of “positing” is called “sich setzen” in Fichte’s System der Sittenlehre nach
den Principien der Wissenschaftslehre. But this central concept of “sich setzen” also
means simply “to sit down” in German. So, while Schopenhauer as a young dissident
was reading his teacher’s book, he showed his critical distance by drawing a chair in
the margin of the System der Sittenlehre, next to the concept of “sich setzen.”35 It is
hard to prove with absolute certainty that Beckett knew this, but he did own a copy
of the fifth volume of Der handschriftliche Nachlass, completely devoted to Schopen-
hauer’s marginalia, possibly sent to Beckett by Barbara Bray.36 One of the marginalia
mentioned in this volume is Schopenhauer’s drawing of the chair on page sixty-eight of
his teacher’s System der Sittenlehre next to the notion of “sich setzen.”37 The drawing
is also mentioned in the editor’s introduction.38
This marginal “Stuhl” can hardly be presented as a genetic constative in the sense
of Wittgenstein’s caricature of the “blocks,” “beams,” and “pillars.” Perhaps it can at
most be regarded as a faint intertextual speck in Beckett’s “grey canon,” but it is part
of it nonetheless. Pozzo’s elaborate way of seating himself can thus be read as a pomp-
ous positing, Beckett’s ironic rendering of a “sich setzen” à la Fichte. If anything is
“fundamental” about Pozzo’s stool, it is not its sedentary aspect, but its portability. The
ambiguity of this “stool” indicates a similar kind of “nominalist irony”39 as the irony
involved in Schopenhauer’s marginal chair as a deliberate misinterpretation of Fichte’s
“sich setzen.” And when the stool reemerges in Beckett’s penultimate text, Stirrings Still,
it is used, not to seat oneself, but to mount on, in order to look through the window,
“exploring the sky” (to employ the words of James Jeans from The Universe Around
Us): “Light of a kind came then from the one high window. Under it still the stool on
which until he could or would no more he used to mount to see the sky.”40
Beckett’s characters often seem to have a hard time “positing” themselves. When,
in the manuscript of L’Innommable, the Unnamable enumerates all the characters
in Beckett’s preceding works with whom he identifies himself, it is remarkable that
he mentions both Estragon and Vladimir, and even Lucky, but not the character who
“posits himself” as Pozzo.41 In Endgame, Clov cannot sit down, and in Not I, Mouth
even seems to refuse to “posit herself” as an I. The play can thus be read as a critical
comment on Fichte, exploring the border zone between subject and object, between
I and Not-I, as a no-man’s land rather than a clear-cut dividing line. This dim twilight
zone between private and public is also applicable to Beckett’s manuscripts. Against
the background of the problem of “positing oneself,” the textual fact that Beckett left
an open variant on the printer’s copy of Stirrings Still is emblematic of the “ontological
status” of the manuscripts and typescripts within his work.42 Beckett seems to have been
well aware that a “work” can be defined as an “experience implied by the authoritative
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

808 versions of a literary writing,” not just by “the” published text—“whatever that is,” as
Hershel Parker duly added.43 The pressure of “positing” a completed version that can
serve as “the” text is part of the reality of publishing, but the genesis of Beckett’s works
often did not stop at the “bon à tirer” moment.
The “status” of modern manuscripts, or their relation to the published text, is not
fixed. What S. E. Gontarski has termed the “grey canon” grows as not only passages
from Beckett’s letters, but also from his notes, diary entries, and drafts are being cited
more frequently in scholarly articles.44 This phenomenon is not limited to Beckett
studies. The manuscripts of several authors have become more accessible to a larger
audience thanks to initiatives like the Whitman Archive (www.whitmanarchive.org),
the electronic edition of Les manuscrits de Madame Bovary (www.bovary.fr), Les
manuscrits de Stendhal (www.manuscrits-de-stendhal.org), or the Beckett Digital
Manuscript Project (www.beckettarchive.org).45 Literature thus takes new shapes, in
which the genesis of the text becomes more accessible as an object of research and
the “work” can also appear as a complex and fascinating dialectic between completion
and incompletion.

Appendix

The following passages from H. Spencer Jones, F. R. S. (Astronomer Royal), “Is there
Life in Other Worlds?” in Discovery: A Monthly Popular Journal of Knowledge, New
Series, vol. 2, no. 10 (January 1939): 36–47, correspond with Samuel Beckett’s notes
in the so-called “Whoroscope” Notebook (University of Reading, UoR MS MS 3000,
fol. 62r–63r). Beckett excerpted the highlighted words in his notebook.

UoR MS 3000, 62r:

cf. Spencer Jones 1939, 40: “It is the gravitational pull of the Earth that prevents
this dissipation. A rocket shot off from the Earth will be drawn back by the force of
gravitation unless the velocity of projection exceeds 7 miles a second. This critical
velocity is called the velocity of escape. For any other planet the velocity of escape
will have a different value, the square of the velocity being proportional to the
mass of the planet and inversely proportional to the radius . . .

Moon 1.5 miles per sec.

Mercury 2.2 ”
Venus 6.5 ”
Earth 7.0 ”
Mars 3.1 ”
Jupiter 38.0 ”
Saturn 23.0 ”
Uranus 13.0 “
Neptune 14.0 ”
Sun 386.0 ”
 Hulle / modern manuscripts and textual epigenetics
809
UoR MS 3000, 63r:
cf. Spencer Jones 1939, 40: “The lighter the molecule the higher is its average speed.
The average speed of a molecule of hydrogen is 1¼ miles a second, whereas the
average speed of oxygen or nitrogen is not much greater than ¼ miles a second.
Consider what is happening at the top of the atmosphere; there will frequently be
molecules that rebound after a collision with a speed several times as great as the
average speed.”

Spencer Jones 1939, 43–44: “Venus. Venus and Mars have special interest and require
more detailed consideration. Venus is the planet most nearly equal to the Earth both
in size and in weight. The velocity of escape from Venus being nearly the same as
from the Earth, [p. 44] we expect to find an extensive atmosphere on Venus, though
the hydrogen will have escaped. The telescope confirms this, for we find Venus to be
covered with a dense permanent layer of clouds . . . The temperature of Venus has
been measured. The temperature of the sunlit face reaches 80° or 90° F., whilst
that of the dark face falls to about 40° below freezing point. Venus has a long
day; its length is not known exactly but it is somewhere about thirty of our days.
This explains the great difference between the midday and midnight temperatures on
Venus . . . The scarcity of oxygen, combined with the abundance of carbon diox-
ide, provides a clue to the conditions prevailing on Venus . . . When life started on the
Earth there was probably plenty of carbon dioxide but comparatively little oxygen in
the atmosphere . . . when life on the Earth may be nearing extinction, Venus may
be the home of higher and higher types of life.”

Spencer Jones 1939, 44: “Mars. The last of the planets to be considered is Mars.”

Spencer Jones 1939, 46: “The low velocity of escape from Mars suggests that, if
Mars has an atmosphere, it must be very tenuous . . . The American astronomer,
Percival Lowell, built up a romantic theory about these canals. He regarded them
as irrigation channels . . . It seems that they are an illusion of vision, arising from a
psychological tendency for the eye, when looking at something that is almost at the
limit of vision, to connect up detail by narrow lines to form a geometrical pattern.”

Spencer Jones 1939, 47: “In Mars we see a world where conditions resemble
those that will probably prevail on our Earth many millions of years hence, when
most of our present atmosphere will have been lost. Mars appears to be a planet
of spent or nearly spent life.”
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

810 Notes
1. Ruby Cohn, A Beckett Canon (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2001), 220; 241.
2. See Peter Shillingsburg, Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age, 3rd ed. (Ann Arbor: The
University of Michigan Press, 1996), 41.
3. Samuel Beckett, Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho, Stirrings Still, ed. Dirk Van Hulle
(London: Faber, 2009), 111.
4. Beckett, Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho, Stirrings Still, 111.
5. John Pilling, ed., Beckett’s “Dream” Notebook (Reading: Beckett International Foundation, 1999).
6. James Jeans, The Universe around Us (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1929), 1–88; see
Pilling, ed., Beckett’s “Dream” Notebook, 145–50.
7. Jeans, The Universe around Us, 15.
8. Pilling, ed., Beckett’s “Dream” Notebook, 146.
9. The so-called “Whoroscope” Notebook is kept at the University of Reading (UoR), MS 3000.
The notes on Venus are on pages 62r–63r.
10. H. Spencer Jones, “Is there Life in Other Worlds?” in Discovery: A Monthly Popular Journal
of Knowledge, New Series, 2.10 (January, 1939): 44.
11. Samuel Beckett, Stirrings Still / Soubresauts and Comment dire / what is the word: an elec-
tronic genetic edition (series The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, module 1), ed. Dirk Van Hulle
and Vincent Neyt (Brussels: University Press Antwerp [ASP/UPA], 2011), UoR MS 2933-1, www.
beckettarchive.org.
12. R. Debray-Genette, “Génétique et poétique: le cas Flaubert,” in Essais de critique génétique,
ed. Louis Hay (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), 21–67.
13. Beckett, Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho, Stirrings Still, 45.
14. See Dirk Van Hulle, The Making of Samuel Beckett’s “Stirrings Still” / “Soubresauts” and
“Comment dire” / “what is the word” (Brussels: University Press Antwerp, 2011), 89. Manuscript
kept at the University of Reading, UoR MS 2934, 6r.
15. Beckett, Stirrings Still / Soubresauts and Comment dire / what is the word, UoR MS 2859,
www.beckettarchive.org.
16. Institut mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC), Fonds John Calder, dossier Beckett
N° 2, CAL2 C51 B2 [1–4].
17. Pierre-Marc de Biasi, “Qu’est-ce qu’un brouillon? Le cas Flaubert: essai de typologie fonction-
nelle des documents de genèse” in Pourquoi la critique génétique? Méthodes, théories, ed. Michel
Contat and Daniel Ferrer (Paris : CNRS éditions, 1998), 31–60; 43.
18. James Knowlson, ed., The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: “Krapp’s Last Tape” (London:
Faber and Faber, 1992), 20. See also James Knowlson, “Krapp’s Last Tape: the evolution of a play,
1958–75” in Journal of Beckett Studies 1.1 (Winter 1976): 50–65; 64: “In the Grove Press annotated
copy (A1), a marginal note on p. 13 reads ‘Action interrupted by first look over his shoulder left into
darkness backstage’; the note in the Faber and Faber annotated copy (A2) is ‘Action interrupted by
Hain 1’ (p.11) In A1, p. 27, a marginal note reads ‘Action interrupted by second look into darkness
as before’; in A2, p. 19, the note is ‘interrupted by Hain 2.’ After the first drink backstage, there is in
both copies the query ‘Faint Hain here?’, A1, p. 17, A2, p. 14.”
19. In Beckett’s copy of Claudius’s works, a card is inserted between pages 884 and 885, reproduc-
ing a letter from Claudius to Voss, 21/8/1774, which included the text of “Der Tod und das Mädchen.”
20. Beckett was well aware of this dedication, as is evidenced by the note he sent to Rosemary
Pountney in 1977 with reference to Claudius: “Freund Hain (or Hein = Heinrich) = Death (ease-
ful) the scytheman. Common in 18th century (Claudius, Lessing, Jean-Paul, Goethe etc.). Claudius
dedicates to him his collected works.” (Beckett as cited by Rosemary Pountney, personal email cor-
respondence, 7 July, 2011).
21. Samuel Beckett, “Krapp’s Last Tape: Revised Text” in Knowlson, ed., The Theatrical Notebooks
of Samuel Beckett: “Krapp’s Last Tape”, 4.
22. Dougald McMillan and James Knowlson, eds., The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett:
“Waiting for Godot” with a revised text (New York: Grove Press, 1993), 23.
 Hulle / modern manuscripts and textual epigenetics
23. Richard Begam, “How to Do Nothing with Words, or Waiting for Godot as Performativity,” in 811
Modern Drama 50.2 (Summer 2007): 138–67.
24. Begam, “How to Do Nothing with Words,” 147.
25. Ibid., 148.
26. Ibid.
27. Garin Dowd, “Prolegomena to a Critique of Excavatory Reason: Reply to Matthew Feld-
man,” in Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui 20 (2008): 375–88; Matthew Feldman, “In Defence of
Empirical Knowledge: Rejoinder to ‘A Critique of Excavatory Reason’,” in Samuel Beckett Today /
Aujourd’hui 20 (2008): 389–99.
28. David Pole, The Later Philosophy of Wittgenstein (London: The Athlone Press, 1958); Samuel
Beckett, letter to Barbara Bray, 21 December, 1962 (Trinity College, Dublin, TCD 10948/1/214).
29. Beckett’s library is still largely preserved at his apartment in Paris. For a full description of
the three books on, and seven books by, Wittgenstein in the personal library, see Mark Nixon and
Dirk Van Hulle, Samuel Beckett’s Library (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012, forthcom-
ing). We owe a debt of gratitude to Edward Beckett for allowing us access to the apartment to study
Beckett’s marginalia.
30. Renate Handke also signed Beckett’s copy of Wittgenstein’s Schriften; Beiheft [mit beiträgen
von Ingeborg Bachmann, Maurice Cranston, Jose Ferrater Mora, Paul Feyerabend, Erich Heller,
Bertrand Russell, George H. von Wright] (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1960). The day after the
opening of Endspiel Beckett returned to Paris on 27 September 1967 after six weeks of rehearsals in
Berlin. See John Pilling, A Samuel Beckett Chronology (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 176.
31. Samuel Beckett, Pour finir encore et autres foirades (Paris: Minuit, 1991), 41; Texts for Nothing
and other Shorter Prose, 1950–1976, ed. Mark Nixon (London: Faber, 2010), 147.
32. Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1981), 207.
33. Daniel Ferrer and Michael Groden, “Introduction,” in Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-
textes, ed. Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer, and Michael Groden (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2004), 2; 11.
34. Wilhelm Windelband, A History of Philosophy, vol. 2 (New York: Harper and Row, 1958), 593.
35. For a reproduction of this drawing, see Sandro Barbera, “La Bibliothèque d’Arthur Schopen-
hauer,” in Bibliothèques d’écrivains, ed. Paolo D’Iorio and Daniel Ferrer (Paris: CNRS Editions,
2001), 108.
36. Arthur Schopenhauer, Randschriften zu Büchern, ed. Arthur Hübscher (Frankfurt a.M.:
Waldemar Kramer, 1968). On 23 May, 1977, Beckett thanked Barbara Bray for some books she had
sent to him and told her that he was “Beginning the Schopenhauer” (TCD MS 10948/1/614).
37. Athur Schopenhauer, Der handschriftliche Nachlass, vol. 5: “Randschriften zu Büchern,”
ed. Arthur Hübscher (Frankfurt a.M.: Waldemar Kramer, 1968), 54: “Sch[openhauer] zeichnet am
Rande einen Stuhl.”
38. “Neben Fichtes Lieblingssatz ‘Das Ich ist, weil es sich setzt’ malt Schopenhauer einen Stuhl
an den Seitenrand.” (Hübscher in Schopenhauer, Der handschriftliche Nachlass, vol. 5: “Randschrif-
ten zu Büchern,” xvii). The quite famous marginalia was already mentioned in Wilhelm Gwinner’s
biography Schopenhauers Leben (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1878), 89: “Zu diesem . . . ‘Sich-Setzen’ pflegte
Schopenhauer zur Bequemlichkeit einen Stuhl zu zeichnen.”
39. For Beckett’s notion of “nominalist irony,” see his German letter to Axel Kaun of 9 July, 1937.
Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. 1, 1929–1940, ed. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and
Lois More Overbeck (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 515.
40. Beckett, Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho, Stirrings Still, 107.
41. In the manuscript of L’Innommable (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University
of Texas at Austin, Samuel Beckett collection, Box 3, Folder 10, fol. 40v), the Unnamable mentions
Belacqua, Murphy, Watt, Mercier, Camier, Victor, Lucky, Vladimir, Estragon, Molloy, Moran, Malone,
and Mahood by name, and the “others” (whose names he forgets), who have claimed at some point
that they were him and who he, in his turn, has tried to “be.”
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

812 42. Shillingsburg, Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age, 41.

43. Ibid., 176; Hershel Parker, “‘The Text Itself’: Whatever That Is,” in Text 3 (1987): 47–54.
44. S. E. Gontarski, “Greying the Canon: Beckett in Performance,” in Beckett after Beckett, ed. S.
E. Gontarski and Anthony Uhlmann (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006), 141–57.
45. Samuel Beckett, Stirrings Still / Soubresauts and Comment dire / what is the word: an elec-
tronic genetic edition (The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, module 1). Edited by Dirk Van Hulle
and Vincent Neyt (Brussels: University Press Antwerp (ASP/UPA), 2011), www.beckettarchive.org.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.