Notes on Reading Repetition in Stein and Beckett
p. 253-265
Résumés
Bien que Beckett fasse explicitement référence à Gertrude Stein dans sa “Lettre allemande” (1937), leurs travaux ont rarement été comparés dans leur dimension poétique. Leurs poétiques semblent conduire à des formes comparables de l’illisible, tels que “A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson” (1922) et “Ping” (1967). Cependant, l’analyse de leurs textes, de leurs théories et de leurs pratiques scripturales permettent de montrer que leurs styles sont sous-tendus par des répétitions bien différentes qui semblent former deux paradigmes de l’utilisation de la répétition : l’une étant du côté de l’occurrence et l’autre du côté de la récurrence.
Though Beckett refers explicitly to Stein in his “German letter,” (1937) Stein and Beckett’s works have seldom been compared for their poetic qualities. Their poetics seem to lead to similar textual forms of the unreadable embodied in “A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson” (1922) and in “Ping” (1967), yet analysing closely their texts, theory and scriptural practices leads to showing how their styles reply on altogether different repetitive impulses. In fact, they seem to delineate two paradigms for the use of repetition in literature: one of occurrence versus one of recurrence.
Texte intégral
1These are preliminary remarks on repetition in Stein and Beckett’s works. What emerges from such a confrontation is that their texts can be read together as poetry, a thing which, to our knowledge, was never done.1 It is also suggested that boundaries between literature from the United States and literature from Ireland and the United Kingdom are thin, and that seeing where these literatures intersect (not just in matters of intertextuality) is productive. In many ways, Stein and Beckett’s repetitive texts are paradigmatic of the unreadable in that many readers can’t make sense of them2 and insofar as our modes of reading are challenged. Instead of concentrating on meaning in such so-called unreadable texts, we will concentrate on significance. In other words, this article is an attempt to read the unreadable.
Comparing the Incomparable
2In Comparing the incomparable, Marcel Détienne vows to “build comparables that are never immediately given,”3 saying that “it is impossible to construct comparables without experimenting” (15). It could be argued that to bring together Stein and Beckett somehow amounts to the irresistible task of comparing the incomparable. Comparing the two means investigating how their poetics intersect, diverge, and then intersect again; in other words it amounts to reading Stein and Beckett alone together. Casting aside biographical connections,4 which would certainly require a full-length historical, sociological, and literary study, we started from the rarely explored notion that in their confrontation to language and the real, what draws Stein and Beckett together is “insistence,” a word Stein uses to describe how repeating comes down to digging language from within:
It is very like a frog hopping he cannot ever hop exactly the same distance or the same way of hopping at every hop. A bird’s singing is perhaps the nearest thing to repetition but if you listen they too vary their insistence. That is the human expression saying the same thing and in insisting and we all insist varying the emphasising.5
The Theory of the Unword
3The infinity of the subject demanded a tangible meeting point. In his so-called “German letter” written in German in 1937 and published posthumously,6 Beckett delineates the programme for his writing of the times, and for his writing to come:
It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it. Grammar and Style. To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true gentleman. A mask. (Beckett, 171)
4With its statements and injunctions akin to the language of the manifestoes of the avant-garde related to what Jerome Rothenberg called the “revolution of the word,”7 the letter defines and invents Beckett’s poetics of unreadability. The old language, i.e. what is often seen as the signified-oriented communicational language, is like an “imperturbable” gentleman. It is into the texture of this equanimous being of language that Beckett strives to “bore one hole after another” (Beckett, 172) thus creating what he calls a “literature of the unword” (Beckett, 173). His poetic position is an inversion of the usual definition of the unreadable given above: what is too readable and stilted is the unreadable or “senseless [ness].” To him, the unreadable depends on the degree of the writer/reader’s nostalgic wish to find comfort in something he has already read.
5This anti-theatrical act (taking off the mask) aiming at destroying the uncritical and nostalgic repetition of stereotypes and at revealing the nakedness of language is seen as a sacrilegious act of violence—“tear the veil apart” turns Matt 27: 51 upside down—against the religion of what Philippe Forest calls “realistic counterfeit/forgery.”8 In his systematic dissolution of language, which he calls “a mocking attitude towards the word” (Beckett, 172), the then budding Irish novelist and poet dismisses Joyce, in whose writing he sees a celebration of the word or, using another religious metaphor, “an apotheosis of the word” (Beckett, 172). He unexpectedly refers to the technique of another modernist:
Perhaps the logographs of Gertrude Stein are nearer to what I have in mind. At least the texture of language has become porous, if only, quite by chance, and as a consequence of a technique similar to that of Feininger. The unfortunate lady (is she still alive?) is doubtlessly still in love with her vehicle, albeit only in the way in which a mathematician is in love with his figures. (Beckett, 172)
6Beckett reads Stein in a deeply involved albeit distanced manner, thus creating the sense that the two authors cannot be thought of but alone together. The identification with Stein is replete with deprecating elements “alas,” “the unfortunate lady,”9 “is she still alive,” “quite by chance,” yet the sour-sweet commendation should be reappraised via the reference to the German expressionist painter Lyonel Feininger, whom, so James Knowlson tells us, Beckett liked in the 1930’s for his “techniques of distortion, fragmentation, isolation and alienation” (Knowlson, 196). Comparing literature to post-cubist painting, Beckett reads Stein as the creator of a distorted and foreign language.
7Coming from ancient Greece (where Logographs were orators), the word “logograph” refers to a system of signs allowing to take down the words of the orators at the Assemblée nationale during the French Revolution, something not unlike shorthand, obviously fitting for such a fervent partisan of the revolution of the word as Gertrude Stein. Beckett’s use of the term “logograph” comes close to the original meaning of the word apparently derived from “real narrative” as opposed to “poetic legend.” In the context of Beckett’s use, it is tempting to read that logographs are means to get as close as possible to the real versus the distance of wonder integral to legends and romances. Beckett concludes: “let us therefore act like that mad mathematician who used a different principle of measurement at each step of his calculation. An assault against words in the name of beauty” (Beckett, 173). This assault and its praxis are very close to Stein’s statement that:
8Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing, with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun . . . . Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns.10
9With Beckett’s apparently uncompromising idea in hindsight, “caressing” crystallises the difference between Stein and Beckett’s approaches to what he calls unwording the word.
“A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson” and “Ping” / “Bing” Alone Together
10Logographs, as in “A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson”11 and in “Ping,”12 are tools of the unreadable, for they challenge reference. Repetition seems to both reinstate a prior instance of a signified and undermine this very process of going back to prior knowledge in continuously renewing writing. Insistence is the very mechanism through which repetition is made to depart from exact repetition via minimal variation.
11Stein’s “A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson” (1922)13 comprises nine different yet overlapping parts challenging narrativity. Repetition questions reference. The full title is “Idem the Same/ A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson.” Identity is at the same time hinted at with a Latinate and a word form old norse /sami/, therefore allowing the double nature of English language to signify in its tautological difference, enabling the essential foreignness of language to emerge from this internal hiatus. The minimalist repetitive style of the text does not seem to make it possible for the word to hold a definite and given meaning any more. The title is porous: in “idem the same,” the same is different in its sameness through the repetitive semantics and the anamorphic distortions of sounds where /d/ and /the/ are linked and where the unstressed and phonetically weak <dem> is distorted into <ame>, the opening diphtong /ei/ closing on the bilabial /m/. These four syllables are on the verge of tautology and yet fall short of being exactly so. The unsettling proximity and foreignness (Latin and Norse) of these two terms set the tone of the poem’s repetitiveness. Infinity of meaning and association is not bred by hyperbolic disparity but through this tiny crack between the two words: porosity allows words to migrate. Such is the beginning:
I knew too that through them I knew too that he was through, I knew too that he threw them. I knew too that they were through, I knew too I knew too, I knew I knew them.
I knew to them. (Stein, 377)
12The aural link between <dem> and “the” in the title transforms into <them> in the course of the poem such as in “I knew too that through them” or “I knew to them,” so that “Idem the same” can also be read as “Idem the same” = “I” “them” the same. And, indeed, though Stein pronounces “Idem” /i: d/, the signifier “I,” announced by the initial of “Idem,” recurs eight times in the first sentence. Moreover, in the audio recording of the poem, Stein reads it so as to stress “I” into an intensive pattern.14 Therefore, “I” s are so numerous that the collection of “I” on the page amounts to a gradual delineation of multiplicity. Indeed, with its reiteration “I” is constantly made anew and shifts into “them” and “they,” that is in to multiple selves. Opening “I” to multiplicity is the very basis of Stein’s investigation of identity as Charles Bernstein says: “Stein celebrates her suspension of identity, this holding off naming to see what otherwise emerges.”15 Indeed, “them,” “they,” and the repetition of the plural are arranged throughout the poem so as to suspend or undermine reference:
We were able to notice that each one in a way carried a bundle, they were not a trouble to them nor were they all bundles as some of them were chickens some of them pheasants some of them sheep and some of them bundles.
13To whom do “they” and “them” refer? Without any narrative line and because of the earlier dissemination of identity, <th>, an anaphoric mark in linguistic terms, is now blurred. In the course of the poem, reference is blocked and set free at the same time: if the reader takes reading as a construction of referential coordinates granting stability to a text, it will be impossible for him or her not to dismiss “that is very right and should come out below and just so.” “So” should refer to something already mentioned, which isn’t traceable, unless “so” is deictic: the text refers to its production in the moment of its production (writing and reading), therefore creating a hiatus in reference.
14The title of the whole text leads the reader into expecting the text to be a love poem to Sherwood Anderson, a gift for the American author’s congenial preface to Geography and Plays, yet the poem turns out to be a love poem dedicated to a woman “she is very lovely and mine which is very lovely.” The reader can try to trace back elements (reference, etymologically, means bringing back), yet he or she will never be able to trace his steps to a stable origin of the text in the past. As Michael Palmer says in Active Boundaries: “The poem only occurs, is only there, in the event of the poem, which is in its engagement with the reader.”16 If this is so, what happens to intertextuality and to the relation of this text with other texts of the literary past? One of the most interesting passages in the text consists in blocking and setting free reference to the literary past in the erasure of Hamlet’s “to be or not to be.”
To Be
No Please.
To Be
They can please
Not to be
Do they please.
Yes please.
Do they please
No please.
Do they not please
No please
Do they please.
Please.
If you please.
And if you please.
And if they please.
And they please.
To be pleased.
Not to be pleased.
Not to be displeased.
To be pleased and to please.
[italics mine]
15Here, the text progressively rubs out the ghost of the tragic exclusive “either/or” logic into the possible comedy of coordination, association, and copia in the multiple configurations ending on the polyptoton “to be pleased and to please.” With this piece, reference steers away from the nostalgic process of turning back and looking for what’s missing. The recurrence of “please” in the whole poem and the ending on a prayer “let us bless it” participates to the almost Shakespearean wish to have the text taken “as you like it,” or to quote “AValentine:” “all these as you please.” If there is an intertext, it happens in the reading, it is an event of the reader’s reading. The intertext is therefore always tentative; it does not depend upon a mechanism of authority and authorization, such as in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land,17 for instance. In Stein’s text, the reader is de facto given the possibility to authorize the intertext or not. One does not have to go back to a point of origin to make the text signify, the intertext is more an occurrence than a reference.
16The text is not a given but a gift to the reader, a “Valentine:” Stein’s poetics seem contained in this drift from given to gift, from the accomplished and essential to the potential offering. In “A Valentine,” memory and knowledge, the given, are insistently made porous by repetition, questioning the very notion of a there. For here and there to happen requires the validation of the proposition “if:” “If you please/ . . . and if they please.” What is usually thought of in humanist culture as the things of the past one relies on by remembering them in the present, is now entirely made of novelty: tellingly, in the visual, aural, and syntactical drift of the beginning of “A Valentine,” “knew” comes to be heard as “new.” Indeed, the text moves from “I knew too that through them” into “I knew to them” which, because of to and the agrammatical construction, can simultaneously be heard as a logograph for “I am new to them.” As Charles Bernstein writes: “her writing becomes a state of willing, of willed, unknowingness” (Bernstein, 144).
17“New” overlapping with “knew” is Beckett’s revolution in act. The word has been “unworded” in Beckett’s sense, language has been mistreated, and holes have been bored into language so that language and the subject are made to drift. Reading and hearing the text, the reader writes in the act the definition of repetition as insistence as Stein saw it, i.e. as creating liveliness into language, remotivating not so much the signified as the aural and visual rhythms of language, as intensities in the continuum of language.
18Beckett’s “Ping” is also such a continuum pierced with intensities along three dense mathematical pages of repetitive paratactic verbless syntax. Its first words are:
All known all white bare white body fixed one yard legs joined like sewn. Light heat white floor one square yard never seen. White walls one yard by two white ceiling one square yard never seen. Bare white body fixed only the eyes only just. Traces blurs light grey almost white on white.
19“Ping,” Beckett’s English translation of “Bing,” is a generically indefinable short text written in French in 1966 and eventually published in Six Residua.18 It perhaps is the model of an unreadable text. Beckett found it “hardly publishable” (Knowlson, 542) and Elisabeth Bregman Segré argues that “on a first reading, one comprehends next to nothing” (Segré, 127). The text itself refers to its absence of meaning and its poetics of meaninglessness: “signs no meaning” is repeated at least six times. With the constant and minimal deviations, and the quasi-mathematical repetitive recombinations of words, the text is one breath away from extinguishing signification. The periodic insistence of “Ping” both imparts rhythmic structure and digs that very structure (The repetition of “Ping” and “Bing” could both be heard as the onomatopoeia for the French noise of a pick against a block of iron).
20In fact, the text is a perfect example of the “logographs” Beckett saw in Stein thirty years before. Indeed, the absence of verbs and the sheer juxtaposition of sentences prevent the text from cohering altogether. It seems to lie on the very limit of predication: before (as stuttering) or beyond (as logorrhoea, yet logorrhoea returning to a state where the linguistic relation awaits predication). Words wish to combine and recombine in new arrangements but none of them makes a full utterance. No clear-cut image or figure emerges from these series of sentences so that it seems that “the traditional referential weight of language is substantially diminished” (Segré, 130). As the recurrence of words such as “trace,” “blurs,” “signs,” or “almost” suggest, “Ping” is made of impossible limits, the text seems to lie beyond or behind fiction. The context and figure (a white bare body, eyes, legs, hands are mentioned but it never coheres into a stable description) have almost disappeared, personal pronouns are done away with and ontological subjects are deleted as if rubbed out by repetitive inscription: “bare white body fixed white on white invisible” (Beckett, 41). “Ping” is infra-language, a mere “murmur,” wishing to neutralise language into a lack-lustre text—“unlustrous” (Beckett, 44).
21The word “Ping” itself could stand as the epitome of the thin fence of sense over which the text sits: the onomatopoeia is the nearest thing to mere noise or meaningless silence. It denotes a “short high-pitched ringing sound, as of a tap on a crystal glass” or a “percussive knocking, especially in internal combustion” thus treading a fine limit between music and mechanical reproduction, which is well-rendered in Michaël Lonsdale’s reading of the French text.19 The French and the English are not equivalent, but the actor, who worked a number of times with Beckett, allows us to hear the rhythms of the French and English texts with his minimal vocal intensities. He hesitates between neutral reading and an actor’s rendition. The anti-theatricality of it all (taking off the mask of language, as Beckett wished) and the inexpressive mode is achieved by a subtle articulation of syllables and a thorough accentuation breeding an oscillation between the monotony and poise of a metronome,20 and the insisting sense that something is exhausted or exhausting. Indeed, the low-pitched voice reads the title “Bing” as a muffled thud rather than a resounding ring, and the repetitions of words are voiced as if there were musical bars punctuated by “Bing” and “Hop” (both translated as “Ping” in the English version). Thus words seem to phase in and out of the continuum, “without within” as the text says (Beckett, 42), which can be read simultaneously as in and out, but also as referring to the pure surface of the text deprived of psychological depth. Indeed, the repetitions and permutations create small islets of rhythm with moments of intensity, which die out and tend to disappear into a blank, almost white silence, culminating in the dying fall: “Ping silence Ping over.”
Aporias of Emptying
22In this “Poetics of exhaustion,”21 the recurrence of syntagms does not amount to a complete disappearence of the text but to a struggle between disappearence and emergence. Whereas in Stein’s discourse on writing, writing does not conclude in aporia, Beckett explicitly inscribes in his work what he calls pure aporia in The Unnamable.22
23As Steven Connor says, “Beckett’s words are attempts to deny or negate by means of the complex detours of affirmation, to efface by means of repetition.”23 And repetition indeed seems to be used as a means to empty language of meaning, to create holes in which language collapses, to achieve the literature of the unword. Yet, it is farther than possible from such definitive proclamations: it is the very death of such finite and final statements. Just like “Imagination dead imagine,” another text in Residua,24 “Ping” is a series of statements always defeated as they are repeated and rearranged. Even when everything has been emptied and everything is over at the end of the piece, the neologism “unover” (Beckett, 42) sticks with the reader and battles against the end. It thus realises Beckett’s famous aporetic formula “fail better.”25 The impossible of the text is situated between, on the one hand, ruptures and holes in the syntax, which create flow, and on the other hand hindrance, obstacle of walls and ceiling, and lack of differentiation—“joined,” sewn” (Beckett, 41). Its tension is bred both by the porosity of grammar and aporia, from a-poros, absence of passage.
24It is telling that as in “A Valentine” the question of “knowing” should jump-start Beckett’s text. The text seems to be confronted with the all-known and what remains after knowing. This is perhaps one of the differences between Stein and Beckett’s otherwise often comparable figures of repetition: his comes after knowledge, whereas in hers knowledge overlaps with the new. In their difference, though, they meet for a second before they diverge: they both practice emptying, yet Beckett’s leads to an aporetic “residuum” on the brink of dying away, whereas hers insists on emptying the word with repetition though at the same time caressing it and replenishing it with an erotic gesture of possible pleasurable creation.
Two Paradigms of Repetition?
25In a sense, Beckett and Stein’s insistence seems on both sides of repetition: recurrence and occurrence. “Binding” and hindrance vs. “sav[ing],” to take Deleuze’s distinction in Difference and repetition.26
26This proximity and yet stark difference in creating a language of the unword, can be read in Beckett’s and Stein’s manuscripts. From Beckett’s work on his texts and on “Ping,” from Stein’s pages and notebooks, it could be argued that Beckett’s mode is one of recurrence, one of ghosting, whereas Stein’s is one of occurrence.
27In “Ping,” starting with the French “Bing,” the manuscripts and typescripts show how Beckett went towards more unreadability. The first draft was very explicit as to the situation of the persona in the geometric room: “La salle. Largeur un mètre. Profondeur un mètre. Hauteur deux mètres. Angles droits. Quatre murs égaux de gauche à droite ABCD.”27 As Beckett went back over the typescripts to write another manuscript version, he took out words and made the text less and less explicit: in a process of repetitive correction, the production of the text undermines reference. Critics, among whom David Lodge (86–87), find the need to go back to the first explicit version so as to make the final text more readable, and provide context and reference. Though this method is highly questionable because the final text relinquishes such access to context, subject, and narration, that critics should be compelled to look back speaks of the very nature of the text: “Bing” and “Ping” are residua, continuations or remains of a past that they wish to rub out into an exhausted surface. Moreover, in “Ping,” Beckett does away with “Hop” and translates it into “Ping,” reducing even further the amount of words and at the same time increasing the repetition of “white,”28 thus neutralising the text even more. The French is not repeated by means of exact translation in the English but is “recasted” (Fitch, 77) as a vague echo of a previous typescript from the last French one. Bruno Clément says: “a book by Samuel Beckett is made of two French and English states, without it being possible to say that the first chronologically is more ‘original’ than the second.”29 Indeed “Ping” is not exactly the last version in a linear development but is made from a series of gestures of recurrence, of going back to the beginning without doing so entirely, creating, as Pascale Sardin argues for “Come and Go,” an uncanny textuality.30
28With Stein, it is also impossible to go back to the genetic origin of the texts, because there’s none: except in a few well-documented cases,31 we are usually confronted with one manuscript, typed by Alice B. Toklas, typically, and one typescript. Paradoxically, this absence of differing versions in the development of the text speaks of its development: it is not constituted by a series of ghosts and drafts that recur into it against its very movement, it occurs with and in (or on) the materiality of the page.
29It appears from this quick analysis of the manuscripts that Stein’s repetition occurs in the act of writing. It is as far as possible from a process of haunting. It is in this language of insistence that Stein undermines the verticality of language and that she is able to trace holes in the structure of language.
30Though much brings them together in their use of repetition as insistence, it seems that it is not overstating to say that on the one hand Beckett crafts a language of entropy, insisting on going towards exhaustion and reduction (unwording), as Luc Janvier says,32 though never extinguishing the possibility of life, and on the other hand a language of generation is produced which, though it unwords, also caresses the rose that it plucks, and insists, imparts new life to it in a poetics that strives to go beyond melancholy.
Notes de bas de page
1 Kawin Bruce F. studies repetition in the two authors but concentrates specifically on novels and plays. Our perspectives also differ in that he builds his theory upon philosophical and religious texts, concluding that “by repetition, a proposition can become a secular mantra.” Telling It Again and Again: Repetition in Literature and Film. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972, 168.
2 For instance, Malcolm Janet. Two lives: Gertrude and Alice. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007, pronounces Stein unreadable because her texts lack meaningful propositions. Her grammar, she comments, is so utterly beyond the realm of comprehension that only a few zealous and perhaps mad critics will follow her in studying her texts.
3 Détienne Marcel. Comparing the Incomparable. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008, 11.
4 Though it is unsure whether Stein and Beckett met, their lives could be compared: they both lived a self-imposed exile in Paris as a means to escape emotional strictures (According to James Knowlson, one of the reasons Beckett fled his country was a need to free himself from his relation to his mother. It is argued that Stein went to Europe and settled in France, never to return to the United States for thirty years, because of a failed love affair with May Bookstaver). One could also note their involvement in and with Eugene Jolas’ journal transition (Stein’s “An Elucidation” was printed in 1927 in the first issue of transition. In 1929, Eugene Jolas published Beckett’s essay “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce” together with “Assumption”). Besides, Stein and Beckett had friends and acquaintances in common: Gertrude Stein’s friend Thornton Wilder was also involved with Beckett’s American Waiting for Godot (Knowlson James. Damned to Fame. London: Bloomsbury, 1997 [1996], 399) and both Beckett and Stein were acquainted with Marcel Duchamp.
5 Stein Gertrude. “Portraits and Repetition,” in Gertrude Stein, Writings 1932–1946. Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman (ed.). New York: Literay Classics of the United States, 1998, 289.
6 Beckett Samuel. Disjecta. Ruby Cohn (ed.). London: John Calder, 1983, 51–54; 170–173.
7 The phrase comes from “The Revolution of the Word Proclamation” published in transition in 1929. In 1974, Jerome Rothenberg’s The Revolution of the Word presented among other well-known figures an anthology of largely ignored or disregarded avant-garde authors such as Bob Brown, Else von Freytag-Loringhoven, Mina Loy. Gertrude Stein was one of the poets. Rothenberg Jerome (ed.), Revolution of the word: A new Gathering of American Avant-Garde Poetry 1914-1945. Boston: Exact Change, 1974.
8 Forest Philippe. Le roman, le réel. Nantes: Éd. Cécile Defaut, 2007, 60.
9 Though, of course, he could be referring to her well-known lack of editorial good fortune: Stein was grieved that her œuvre would neither find a worthy publisher, nor sell widely (Three Lives and the autobiographies apart). This, Beckett also had in common with her: his career before WW II was also very unfortunate in terms of finding a publisher.
10 Stein Gertrude. “Poetry and Grammar,” in Gertrude Stein, Writings 1932–1946. Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman (ed.). New York: Lireray Classics of the United States, 1998, 327
11 Stein Gertrude. “A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson,” (1922). Rpr. Ulla Dydo (ed.), A Stein Reader. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993, 376.
12 Beckett Samuel. “Ping,” (1967) in Six Residua. London: John Calder, 1999 (1978), 39–44.
13 Originally published in the Little Review, several versions of the text are now available in print, the version chosen here is the most extensive one reprinted in Dydo Ulla (ed.). A Stein Reader. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993. 377–380. It was chosen on account of Dydo’s meticulous and reliable work with the manuscripts, and for the reader’s easier access of the material.
14 Stein Gertrude. Gertrude Stein Reads. Caedmon audio. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1996 (1956).
15 Bernstein Charles. “Stein’s Identity,” in My Way: Speeches and Poems. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999, 144.
16 Palmer Michael. Active Boundaries. New York: New Directions, 2008, 246.
17 It has been argued, though, that the notes at the end of The Waste Land question the very notion of authority in that they are not systematic.
18 For other analyses of “Ping” see Hubert Renée Riese (“À la trace de ‘Bing,’” in Tom Bishop and Raymond Federman ed., Samuel Beckett. Paris: Éd. de l’Herne, 1976, 269–79), Kohn Ruby (Back to Beckett. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1973), Lodge David (“Some ‘Ping’ Understood.” Encounter 30: 2: 85–89, 1968), and Segré Elizabeth (“Style and Structure in Beckett’s ‘Ping: ’ That Something Itself.” Journal of Modern Literature 6.1: 1977, 127–47).
19 Lonsdale Michael. Poèmes; Mirlitonnades; Imaginations Morte Imaginez; Bing. Read by Michael Lonsdale. Paris: Art & lectures, 1984. This audio-cassette is no longer distributed. I am grateful to curators of the Bibliothèque nationale de France for giving me permission to listen to this recording.
20 Beckett was used to having his actors rehearse with a metronome both to get the rhythms right but also to rid them of the temptation of expressive interpretation.
21 Kelly Paul B. (Stories for Nothing, Samuel Beckett’s narrative Poetics. New York: Peter Lang, 2002) uses this phrase after “L’épuisé,” Gilles Deleuze’s essay on Beckett’s Quad (Deleuze Gilles. “L’épuisé,” in Samuel Beckett, Quad. Paris: Éd. de Minuit, 1992, 55–106).
22 Beckett Samuel. The Unnamable. London: John Calder, 1960, 3.
23 Connor Steven. Samuel Beckett, Repetition, Theory and Text. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988, 9–10.
24 Beckett Samuel. “Imagination dead imagine,” in Six Residua. London: John Calder, 1999 (1978), 33–38.
25 In Worstward Ho (Beckett Samuel. Worstward Ho. London: John Calder, 1983), this phrase is produced by the rhetorical and rhythmical mechanisms, and the semantics of repetition: “Ever tried. Ever failed. Try again. Fail again. Fail better” (7). The very mechanisms of repetition and the repetition of “again” logically produce the idea of a perfectible failure, opening onto the asymptote of faultless failure. In other words, stubborn repetition—trying means failing yet one will keep on trying—reads as the impossibility to cease and die though the impulse of movement is towards death. Indeed, Christopher Ricks’ title for the first chapter of Beckett’s Dying Words (Ricks Christopher. Beckett’s Dying Words. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995) is “the wish to die,” and Pascale Sardin (“Répétition, différence et mort dans Come and Go/Va-et-Vient/Kommen und Gehen, de l’étrangement féminin vu par Samuel Beckett,” Coulisses, 37: 2008, 87) argues that in Beckett’s texts repetition is moved by death drives. However, Winnie’s very insistence on continuing to speak and act repetitively in Happy Days can also be read as resistance opposed to entropic movement.
26 Deleuze’s sentence is translated into: “No doubt it is repetition which already binds; but if we die of repetition we are also saved and healed by it—healed, above all, by the other repetition,” Difference and repetition. Tr. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, 6.
27 Admussen Richard L. The Samuel Beckett Manuscripts: AStudy. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1979, 13
28 Fitch Brian T. Brian, Beckett and Babel: An Investigation into the Status of the Bilingual Work. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1988, 68.
29 Clément Bruno. L’Œuvre sans qualités, rhétorique de Samuel Beckett. Paris: Seuil, 1994, 26.
30 I wish to thank Claire Joubert for this reference.
31 See Ulla Dydo’s Gertrude Stein: The Language that Rises. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern UP, 2003, 488–525.
32 Janvier Luc. Beckett. Paris: Seuil, 1969, 31.
Auteur
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Vincent Broqua
Université de Paris-Est
Vincent Broqua teaches at the Paris-Est University. His research focuses on twentieth and twenty-first century poetry and on the links between North America and the UK. He has worked on the reception of Shakespeare in the US (specifically in modernist and experimental poetry), women experimental poets in the UK and their relation to North American experimental poetry, and translation. He has published articles on Caroline Bergvall, Jen Bervin, John Cage, Redell Olsen, Stephen Ratcliffe, Steve Reich, William Shakespeare, Gertrude Stein, Rosmarie Waldrop, Jérôme Mauche. Vincent Broqua is a founding member of webjournal and reading series Double Change (www.doublechange.com).
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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