Volume 39, Number 14 · August 13, 1992
The Last Word
By John Banville
Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho
by Samuel Beckett
Calder Publications, 128 pp., £5.99 (paper)
The last four prose works of Samuel Beckett, from Company in 1980 to Stirrings Still in 1988, appear to represent a change of artistic direction which professional, academic critics have greeted with an uneasiness that rises at times to what sounds like consternation. The Polish scholar S.E. Gontarski spotted this seeming shift early on, remarking in 1983 that 'Beckett is much less theoretically consistent than one might expect (the later work especially running against earlier theory),'[1] while the English critic David Watson in 1991 wrote of Beckett's having 'remarkably produced a series of significantly longer, more sustained fictions, involving in part a return to traditional discourses of narrative representation, though of course in a manner fundamentally informed by the preceding intertext of experimental fictions.'[2] Is there a note of anxiety detectable in that 'of course'?
Review, 4441 words
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