Patrick Bixby, Samuel Beckett and the Postcolonial Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 49/$84, hardback. ISBN:

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1 Book Reviews 231 of this essay collection. Mary Bryden s Midcentury Godot is of enormous interest for its analysis of the reactions to the first American productions of the play, and Elin Diamond s linkage of Beckett and Caryl Churchill, while not claiming a relationship of influence, offers a suggestive set of thematic and formal correspondances which are a welcome break from the more obvious inheritor, Harold Pinter. Julie Campbell s essay on Paul Auster s creative misreading of Beckett draws on Harold Bloom s anxiety of influence and D. W. Winnicott s theories of creativity and self-recognition to consider Beckett and Auster s depictions of the father-son relationship. Finally, Hersh Zeifman s entertaining Staging Sam takes as its starting point Beckettian references in contemporary popular culture for a survey of the depiction of Beckett as a character in contemporary plays by Michael Hastings, Sean Dixon and Justin Fleming. Sinéad Mooney DOI: /jobs Patrick Bixby, Samuel Beckett and the Postcolonial Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 49/$84, hardback. ISBN: In 1995, Declan Kiberd wrote of his belief that the introduction of the Irish case in the debate [over post-colonies] will complicate, extend, and in some cases expose the limits of current modes of postcoloniality (5). What Patrick Bixby s book clearly demonstrates is that even after the extensive scholarship devoted to Ireland and postcoloniality since 1995, the debate remains complex and the findings contentious. This level of complexity is naturally compounded by the question of Beckett s relationship with Ireland, which never fails to promote debate among critics (as one Beckett scholar said at a recent conference, only half in jest: There is the Irish Beckett and there is the real Beckett ). Bixby accepts from the outset that his book must make a case for the inclusion of Ireland as a postcolonial country and for a reading of Beckett s work in the context of its political and historical background. Underpinning his argument is a rejection of modernist readings of Beckett s novels and an assertion that the works parody and critique the very

2 232 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES modes of modernism itself. As Bixby succinctly puts it, Beckett s narratives of failure serve to successfully critique both canonical literary forms and canonical forms of identity (8). Bixby s stated aim is to question Georg Luckás s reading of Beckett as an apolitical and an ahistorical writer. A political analysis of Beckett s work should not merely confine itself to Ireland, as has recently been shown by Pascale Casanova and Andrew Gibson; however, it is alongside those critics who read the effect of Ireland in Beckett s work that Bixby s book will most fruitfully by read. In particular, it should be read alongside Seán Kennedy s influential collection, Beckett and Ireland (2010), which also contains a chapter by Bixby. Kennedy notes in the introduction to the collection that until recently, readings of Beckett in relation to Ireland have tended to remain a sideshow to the main business of Beckett studies (2) and it is certainly the case that Bixby s work demands that the Irish context be accepted as part of the main business of Beckett criticism. The book offers diligent scholarship on the political environment of the period and situates its argument within postcolonial discourse. To this end Bixby proposes that the novels be read as minor literature as defined by Deleuze and Guattari, a critique of the very genre of colonial literature, in particular the Bildungsroman. Bixby asserts that the interrogation and parody of the forms in which he is writing is at the core of Beckett s work. But, he claims, their precise political and historical contexts deserve equal assessment. For Bixby, there is common cause in Beckett s critique of the regressive conservatism of the new Free State and the impulse to parody the form of the Bildungsroman in Dream of Fair to middling Women. In his analysis of 1920s and 1930s Irish society Bixby is thorough and nuanced, although he does tend to ascribe too much blame to Éamon de Valera and his 1932 Fianna Fáil government for the conservatism of the nation-building project, given that a deep conservatism, finessed by an authoritarian Roman Catholicism, was in fact detectable from the very founding of the State in He does recognise, however, that the two iconic acts of public conservatism, the 1923 Censorship of Films Act and the 1929 Censorship of Publications Act, were created by the Cumann na ngaedhal government, de Valera s Civil War enemies. Dream is read as a parody of James Joyce s A Portrait of the Artist as

3 Book Reviews 233 a Young Man, itself a failed Bildungsroman, as it registers the ambivalent push and pull between alienation and identification, personal experience and racial communion, the desire for selfformation and the demands of national development (51). Bixby characterizes the parody as indicative of minor writing which challenges developmental narrative on both formal and thematic levels (81). The assessment of Murphy is more successful as it explores ideas of the in-between space and Homi K. Bhabha s theorising of the unhomely in Murphy s status as immigrant and exile. Unhomeliness is perpetuated by the paradoxical nature of exilic writing in which to be in exile is both an enriching motif and also the cause of the crippling sorrow of engagement (93). The immigrant Murphy has minority status (92) as a social, cultural, and economic outsider whose exile coincides with a rise in the numbers of those arriving from Ireland, driven to exile by the isolationist economic war pursued by the Irish government in the 1930s. Murphy s situation as Other echoes Beckett s own experience of the patronising English habit of addressing him in the pubs and shops as Pat or Paddy (Knowlson 186). For Bixby, London is represented as an in-between space, inhabited by marginalised immigrants from the periphery of the Empire. Not content in portraying Murphy merely as a reconstructed novel of Irish emigration, he draws attention to Beckett s deployment of the figures of the Hindu polyhistor and the astrologer Pandit Suk amongst a cast of unnamed colonial refugees to argue that the novel clearly intends to internationalise its locus, shifting its focus to the centre of the Empire, London, rather than the peripheral home place of novels of Irish emigration. What he terms this re-imagining of London allows Bixby to draw a clear line from Beckett to V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie and Anita Desai. The raising of issues of ethnography and anthropology in Watt, in turn, allows for meditation on the dangerously eugenicist Harvard Irish Study ( ), echoing John Brannigan s recent book, Race in Modern Culture (2009). Watt is also read, correctly I feel, as an example of an Irish Big House novel, primarily because of Mr Knott s house and Beckett s depiction of Knott which, Bixby demonstrates, brings to mind the stereotypical Big House

4 234 JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES owner as he appears to be the last of his line amidst domestic chaos (129). However, Bixby s claim that the Big House novel celebrate(s) the ideal of the gentry-manor that stretched back to the eighteenth century (131) is problematic, as it overlooks those novels that advance a critique of colonialism in Ireland. From Maria Edgeworth s Castle Rackrent (1800) to Elizabeth Bowen s The Last September (1929), the Irish Big House novel satirises its occupants more than it does the natives on its periphery and portrays the house as a ramshackle dwelling barely fit for human habitation. Both of these traits are also clearly present in Watt. The examination of the trilogy focuses on representations of landscape which, Bixby argues, becomes a no-man s land displaying a fractured cultural inheritance and the ambivalent desire for longing (161). Beckett s landscapes have been read either as a land of specters, its population ghosts (Ackerley and Gontarski, 161) or as mimetic representations of Ireland as in Eoin O Brien s The Beckett Country (1986). Bixby argues instead that what is represented is an increasingly deterritorialized island and supports this thesis with an analysis of what he describes as the complex interactions of language, place, and history in Irish culture (168), drawing on numerous recent studies of representations of space and Irish culture. Bixby argues that Beckett s work resists the modernist impulse to relegate placedness to the status of vestige. By renegotiating the ideas of home and place, Bixby suggests, the novels in the trilogy address crucial features of postcolonial writing (169). Bixby avoids the pitfalls of a historicist approach by applying a thoroughly researched historical perspective to an interrogation of Beckett s engagement with genre, in particular the Bildungsroman. This focus allows him to argue that Beckett s literary concerns need to be understood in the singular historical and political context in which Beckett found himself, as a citizen of a newly-independent Ireland. It also allows Bixby to argue against the received reading of Beckett as a modernist detached from any specific political context. Bixby reads Beckett as a postcolonial novelist apriori, not solely because his novels address the concerns of Naipaul, Rushdie and others but also because of his lived experience in the aftermath of Irish independence. Bixby s achievement is in illuminating and extending the debate of Beckett s Irishness and

5 Book Reviews 235 questions of the postcolonial state by exposing the complexity of their interrelatedness. Feargal Whelan DOI: /jobs WORKS CITED Ackerley, Chris and S.E. Gontarski (2004), The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett,NewYork:Grove. Kennedy, Seán (2010), Ireland/Europe...Beckett/Beckett, in Beckett and Ireland, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp Kiberd, Declan (1995), Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation, London: Jonathan Cape. Knowlson, James (1996), Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, London: Bloomsbury. Biography, Aesthetics, and Beckett s Inauthentic Self Mark Nixon, Samuel Beckett s German Diaries , London and New York: Continuum, pp. 60/$110, hardback. ISBN: Continuum s series Historicizing Modernism did well to pick up Mark Nixon s Samuel Beckett s German Diaries Beckett s aesthetic project is central to the modernist movement he reacts against and refashions. And as for historicizing, even the Nayman from Noland, as Ellmann famously dubbed Beckett, has gradually found his work yielding to the historical turn in modernist scholarship of the last two decades. What could be a more forceful encounter with history than a six-month trip through Nazi Germany, meticulously, excessively, if idiosyncratically documented by Beckett? Nixon explains the trip as a multifaceted journey undertaken to counter personal creative disorientation, an account Nixon depicts with pointillist quotes from manuscripts, principally Beckett s six-volume German Diaries, but other workbooks too the Whoroscope and Clare Street notebooks as