Volume 28, Number 7 · April 30, 1981
Comedy of Ignorance
By Michael Wood
Rockaby and Other Short Pieces
by Samuel Beckett
Grove Press, 80 pp., $4.95 (paper)
Company
by Samuel Beckett
Grove Press, 63 pp., $8.95
Just Play: Beckett's Theater
by Ruby Cohn
Princeton University Press, 313 pp., $18.50
Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett
by James Knowlson, by John Pilling
Grove Press, 292 pp., $9.50 (paper)
Beckett and the Voice of Species: A Study of the Prose Fiction
by Eric P. Levy
Gill and Macmillan/Barnes & Noble, 145 pp., $22.50
The setting of almost all of Samuel Beckett's work is that of Krapp's Last Tape, written in 1958: 'A late evening in the future.' The future is not a place, and not much of a time; it is a guess, a possibility, a threat. We may say it is in the head, and that is where Beckett's characters often think they are: in an 'imaginary head,' an 'abandoned head'; 'we are needless to say in a skull'; 'perhaps we're in a head, it's as dark as in a head before the worms get at it, ivory dungeon.' But the head in this meaning is not a place either. It is a metaphor, a spatialization of the unseeable mind, and it is important not to be taken in by the familiarity of the figure. 'Que tout ça est physique,' the narrator of The Unnamable (1953)[*] moans as he tries to picture the unpicturable.
Review, 4984 words
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