The Making of Samuel Beckett's Not I / Pas moi, That Time / Cette fois and Footfalls / Pas

(Paperback)

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This volume of the BDMP series charts the genesis of three iconic Beckett plays: Not I (1973), That Time (1976) and Footfalls (1976), all translated into French by their author. Including analyses of abandoned archival precursors the Kilcool drafts (1963) and the Petit Odon Fragments (19671968) the book covers a crucial period in Becketts playwriting career, during which his long-held ambition to stage a mouth babbling in the dark became a catalyst for some of his most innovative work. This volume provides a comprehensive guide to the history of the three plays, tracking their development from compositional manuscripts through to publication and performance. The book contends that these plays should be seen as stagings of the subjectobject breakdown explored in Becketts early writing. Drawing on the notes he took on psychology and psychoanalysis in 19341935, it examines the many psychological and psychoanalytic concepts that are used in the authors later stagings of the mind. The plays are analysed through the lens of enactive cognition: not as representations of particular psychological conditions, but as pieces which encourage active interpretation on the part of their audiences. By staging minds in states of breakdown that resist diagnosis, Not I / Pas moi, That Time / Cette fois and Footfalls / Pas enact the subjectobject breakdown that is such a key part of Becketts aesthetics.

Reviews

With this monograph, Little effectively convinces us that the successive drafts offer evidence of a heightening of interpretive ambiguity and uncertainty that blurs the line between self and other, inside and outside, reality and fiction. Doing this, Little concludes, will probably not solve the questions asked by these works Who is Godot What happened to Mouth in the field Is May alive or dead but it can help us better understand how these questions are posed (483). For all these reasons, this volume in the BDMP series is without doubt a highly commendable and very rewarding read for those researchers interested in an in-depth foray into Becketts late theatre and creative mind. * Textual Cultures *

Author Bio

James Little is a postdoctoral researcher at Masaryk University, Brno and Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic, where his research focuses on Irish writing, genetic criticism and performance. He is the author of Samuel Beckett in Confinement: The Politics of Closed Space (2020).