Re--Joyce'n Beckett

Book excerpt: This ground-breaking collection of essays combines the efforts of twelve contributors to explore previously uncharted paths in the literary relationship between James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, two of the foremost writers of the twentieth century. Eleven essays, written by scholars from Canada, England, the United States, and New Zealand, throw new light on the biographies, texts, techniques, and artistic consciousness of Joyce and Beckett as well as on fundamental questions of literary authority and influence. In addition, the volume contains the first working bibliography devoted exclusively to the Joyce-Beckett relationship. The collection culminates with an original one-act play that celebrates both writers in, with, and through the language that they each explored so profoundly. The eleven essays provide a number of avenues for discussing the literary relationship between Joyce and Beckett: Melvin Friedman assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the Joyce and Beckett biographies by Richard Ellmann and Deirdre Bair. John Fletcher and John P. Harrington provide complementary studies of two of Beckett's early short stories in relation to their possible "counterparts" in Dubliners. James Acheson and David Cohen both draw on Ulysses and various works by Beckett to focus attention on links and divergencies between the two writers in their uses of allusions. Analyzing fictional techniques, Michael Patrick Gillespie foregrounds the impulse for gaming that Joyce and Beckett both employ as a narrative strategy. Alan Loxterman explores the techniques both writers use to raise metaphysical questions. Susan Brienza and Phyllis Carey provide complementary readings of artistic consciousness, Brienza drawing attention to bodily fluids and elimination as images of creation, and Carey focusing on the divergent debts of both writers to Dante. Finally, Steven Connor and Ed Jewinski attack the problems of "authority" and "influence," respectively in the process illuminating differences in modernist and postmodernist understandings of these concepts. A bibliography of well over one hundred entries, compiled by John P. Harrington, lists the most substantive discussions of the Joyce-Beckett relationship. Denis Regan's one-act play Becket et Joyce et Beckettesque, creates a medley of Beckett and Joyce echoes through imaginative dialogues in the afterlife mind of Samuel Beckett. Although the volume was in progress when Samuel Beckett died in December 1989, it now serves as a memorial and a tribute to both Samuel Beckett and James Joyce.